The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita (1913)

TV

aSTCS*

L.B.S. National Academy of Administration

STtfft

MUSSbORIE

v gKEPMU
LIBRARY

anrrfq *rwr

Accession No.

*RT timi
Class No.

3^*T<s*TT
Book No.

Sie^

QL 294.5924
STE

102286

LBSNAA

THE OCCULT SIGNIFICANCE
OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA

THE OCCULT SIGNIFICANCE
©F THE BHAGAVAD GITA

Nine Lectures

by

R{TBS}LF STEINER

Helsingfors, May 28-June 5, 1913

ANTHROPOSOPHIC PRESS, INC.

NEW YORK

Translated from shorthand reports un-
revised by the lecturer, from the Ger-
man edition published with the title,
Die okkulten Grundlagen der Bhaga -
vad Gita (Vol. 146 in the Bibliograph-
ical Survey, 1961). Translated by
George and Mary Adams with further
emendations by Doris M. Bugbey.

Copyright © 1968*
by Anthroposophic Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog No. 68-26703

This translation has been authorized
for the western hemisphere by agree-
ment with the Rudolf Steiner Nach-
lassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.

Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Lecture I, May 28, 1913 1

Lecture II, May 29, 1913 16

Lecture III, May 30, 1913 34

Lecture IV, May 31, 1913 47

Lecture V, June 1,1913 64

Lecture VI, June 2, 1913 77

Lecture VII, June 3, 1913 92

Lecture VIII, June 4, 1913 106

Lecture IX, June 5, 1913 123

v

THE OCCULT SIGNIFICANCE
OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA

I

It IS MORE than a year since I was able to speak here
about those things that lie so deeply on our hearts, those
things that we believe must enter more and more into hu-
man knowledge because, from our time onward, the human
soul will feel increasingly that these things belong to its re-
quirements, to its deepest longings. And it is with great
pleasure that I greet you here in this place for the second
time, along with all those who have travelled here in order
to show in your midst how their hearts and souls are dedi-
cated to our sacred work the whole world over.

When I was able to speak to you here last time we let our
spiritual gaze journey far into the wide regions of the uni-
verse. This time it will be our task to stay more in the re-
gions of earthly evolution. Our thoughts, however, will pene-
trate to regions that will lead us nonetheless to the portals
of the eternal manifestation of the spiritual in the world.
We shall speak about a subject that will apparently lead us
far away in time and in space from the here and now. It
will not on that account lead us less to what lives in the here
and now, but rather to what lives just as much in all times
and in all the places of the earth because it will bring us
near to the secrets of the eternal in all existence. It will
lead us to the ceaseless search of man for the wells of eter-

i

nity where he may drink for the healing and refreshment of
something in him which, ever since they gained under-
standing of it, men have considered all-powerful in life,
namely, love . For wherever we are gathered together we are
gathered in the name of the search for wisdom and the
search for love. What we seek is extended out into space
and can be observed in the far horizon of the Cosmic All,
but it can also be observed in the wrestling soul of man
wherever he may be. It meets us especially when we turn
our gaze to one of those mighty manifestations of the wres-
tling spirit of man such as are given us in some great work
like the one that is to form the basis of our present studies.

We are going to speak of one of the greatest and most
penetrating manifestations of the human spirit — the Bha-
gavad Gita , which, ancient as it is, yet in its foundations
comes before us with renewed significance at the present
time. A short time ago the peoples of Europe, and those
of the West generally, knew little of the Bhagavad Gita .
Only during the last century has the fame of this wonderful
poem extended to the West. Only lately have Western peo-
ples become familiar with this marvellous song. But these
lectures of ours will show that a real and deep knowledge
of this poem, as against mere familiarity with it, can only
come when its occult foundations are more and more re-
vealed. For what meets us in the Bhagavad Gita sprang
from an age of which we have often spoken in connection
with our anthroposophical studies. The mighty sentiments,
feelings and ideas it contains had their origin in an age
that was still illumined by what was communicated through
the old human clairvoyance. One who tries to feel what this
poem breathes forth page by page as it speaks to us, will
experience, page by page, something like a breath of the an-
cient clairvoyance humanity possessed.

2

The Western world’s first acquaintance with this poem
came in an age in which there was little understanding for
the original clairvoyant sources from which it sprang. Nev-
ertheless, this lofty song of the Divine struck like a wonder-
ful flash of lightning into the Western world, so that a man
of Central Europe, when he first became acquainted with
this Eastern song, said that he must frankly consider him-
self happy to have lived in a time when he could become ac-
quainted with the wondrous things expressed in it. This
man was not one who was unacquainted with the spiritual
life of humanity through the centuries, indeed through thou-
sands of years. He was one who looked deeply into spiritual
life — Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of the celebrated
astronomer. Other members of Western civilization, men
of widely different tongues, have felt the same. What a won-
derful feeling it produces in us when we let this Bhagavad
Gita work upon us, even in its opening verses!

It seems that in our circle, my dear friends, perhaps par-
ticularly in our circle, we often have to begin by working
our way through to a fully unprejudiced position. For in
spite of the fact that the Bhagavad Gita has been known for
so short a time in the West, yet its holiness has so taken our
hearts by storm, so to say, that we are inclined to approach
it from the start with this feeling of holiness without making
it clear to ourselves what the starting-point of the poem
really is. Let us for once place this before us quite dispas-
sionately, perhaps even a little grotesquely.

A poem is here before us that from the very first sets us
in the midst of a wild and stormy battle. We are introduced
to a scene of action that is hardly less wild than that into
which Homer straightway places us in the Iliad . We go
further and are confronted in this scene with something
which Arjuna — one of the foremost, perhaps the foremost

3

of the personalities in the Song — feels from the start to be
a fratricidal conflict. He comes before us as one who is hor-
ror-stricken by the battle, for he sees there among the enemy
his own blood relations. His bow falls from his grasp when
it becomes clear to him that he is to enter a murderous strife
with men who are descended from the same ancestors as
himself, men in whose veins flows the same blood as his
own. We almost begin to sympathize with him when he
drops his bow and recoils before the awful battle between
brothers.

Then before our gaze arises Krishna, the great spiritual
teacher of Arjuna, and a wonderful, sublime teaching is
brought before us in vivid colors in such a way that it ap-
pears as a teaching given to his pupil. But to what is all
this leading? That is the question we must first of all set
before us, because it is not enough just to give ourselves up
to the holy teaching in the words of Krishna to Arjuna. The
circumstances of its giving must also be studied. We must
visualize the situation in which Krishna exhorts Arjuna not
to quail before this battle with his brothers but take up his
bow and hurl himself with all his might into the devastating
conflict. Krishna’s teachings emerge amid the battle like a
cloud of spiritual light that at first is incomprehensible, and
they require Arjuna not to recoil but to stand firm and do
his duty in it. When we bring this picture before our eyes
it is almost as though the teaching becomes transformed by
its setting. Then again this setting leads us further into the
whole weaving of the Song of the Mahabharata, the mighty
song of which the Bhagavad Gita is only a part.

The teaching of Krishna leads us out into the storms of
everyday life, into the wild confusion of human battles, er-
rors and earthly strife. His teaching appears almost like a
justification of these human conflicts. If we bring this

4

picture before us quite dispassionately, perhaps the Bha-
gavad Gita will suggest to us altogether different questions
from those that arise when — imagining we can understand
them — we alight upon something similar to what we are
accustomed to find in ordinary works of literature. So it is
perhaps necessary to point first to this setting of the Gita in
order to realize its world-historic significance, and then be
able to see how it can be of increasing and special signifi-
cance in our own time.

I have already said that this majestic song came into the
Western world as something completely new, and almost
equally new were the feelings, perceptions and thoughts
that lie behind it. For what did Western civilization really
know of Eastern culture before it became acquainted with
the Bhagavad Gita ? Apart from various things that have
only become known in this last century, very little indeed 1
If we except certain movements that remained secret,
Western civilization has had no direct knowledge of what is
actually the central nerve impulse of the whole of this great
poem. When we approach such a thing we feel how little
human language, philosophy, ideas, serving for everyday
life, are sufficient for it; how little they suffice for describing
such heights of the spiritual life of man upon earth. We need
something quite different from ordinary descriptions to
give expression to what shines out to us from such a revela-
tion of the spirit of man.

I should like first to place two pictures before you so you
may have a foundation for further descriptions. The one is
taken from the book itself, the other from the spiritual life
of the West. This can be comparatively easily understood,
whereas the one from the book appears for the moment
quite remote. Beginning then with the latter, we are told
how, in the midst of the battle, Krishna appears and un-

5

veils before Arjuna cosmic secrets, great immense teach-
ings. Then his pupil is overcome by the strong desire to see
the form, the spiritual form of this soul, to have knowl-
edge of him who is speaking such sublime things. He begs
Krishna to show himself to him in such manner as he
can in his true spirit form. Then Krishna appears to him
(later we shall return to this description) in his form — a
form that embraces all things, a great, sublime, glorious
beauty, a nobility that reveals cosmic mysteries. We shall
see there is little in the world to approach the glory of
this description of how the sublime spirit form of the
teacher is revealed to the clairvoyant eye of his pupil.

Before Arjuna’s gaze lies the wild battlefield where much
blood will have to flow and where the fratricidal struggle
is to develop. The soul of Krishna’s disciple is to be
wafted away from this battlefield of devastation. It is to
perceive and plunge into a world where Krishna lives in his
true form. That is a world of holiest blessedness, with-
drawn from all strife and conflict, a world where the secrets
of existence are unveiled, far removed from everyday af-
fairs. Yet to that world man’s soul belongs in its most in-
ward, most essential being. The soul is now to have knowl-
edge of it. Then it will have the possibility of descending
again and re-entering the confused and devastating battles
of this our world. In truth, as we follow the description of
this picture we may ask ourselves what is really taking
place in Arjuna’s soul? It is as though the raging battle in
which it stands were forced upon it because this soul feels
itself related to a heavenly world in which there is no hu-
man suffering, no battle, no death. It longs to rise into a
world of the eternal, but with the inevitable force that can
come only from the impulse of so sublime a being as
Krishna, this soul must be forced downward into the chaotic

6

confusion of the battle. Arjuna would gladly turn away
from all this chaos, for the life of earth around him ap-
pears as something strange and far away, altogether un-
related to his soul. We can distinctly feel this soul is still
one of those who long for the higher worlds, who would live
with the Gods, and who feel human life as something foreign
and incomprehensible to them. In truth a wondrous pic-
ture, containing things of sublime import!

A hero, Arjuna, surrounded by other heroes and by the
warrior hosts — a hero who feels all that is spread before
him as unfamiliar and remote — and a God, Krishna, who is
needed to direct him to this world. He does not understand
this world until Krishna makes it comprehensible to him. It
may sound paradoxical, but I know that those who can en-
ter into the matter more deeply will understand me when I
say that Arjuna stands there like a human soul to whom
the eathly side of the world has first to be made comprehen-
sible.

Now this Bkagavad Gita comes to men of the West who
undoubtedly have an understanding for earthly things! It
comes to men who have attained such a high degree of ma-
terialistic civilization that they have a very good under-
standing for all that is earthly. It has to be understood by
souls who are separated by a deep gulf from all that a genu-
ine observation shows Arj una’s soul to be. All that to which
Arjuna shows no inclination, needing Krishna to tame him
down to earthly things, seems to the Westerner quite intel-
ligible and obvious. The difficulty for him lies rather in
being able to lift himself up to Arjuna, to whom has to be
imparted an understanding of what is well understood in the
West, the sense matters of earthly life. A God, Krishna,
must make our civilization and culture intelligible to Ar-
juna. How easy it is in our time for a person to understand

7

what surrounds him! He needs no Krishna. It is well for
once to see clearly the mighty gulfs that can lie between dif-
ferent human natures, and not to think it too easy for
a Western soul to understand a nature like that of Krishna
or Arjuna. Arjuna is a man, but utterly different from those
who have slowly and gradually evolved in Western civiliza-
tion.

That is one picture I wanted to bring you, for words can-
not lead us more than a very little way into these things.
Pictures that we can grasp with our souls can do better be-
cause they speak not only to understanding but to that in
us which on earth will always be deeper than our under-
standing — to our power of perception and to our feeling.
Now I would like to place another picture before you, one
not less sublime than that from the Bhagavad Gita but that
stands infinitely nearer to Western culture. Here in the
West we have a beautiful, poetic picture that Western man
knows and that means much for him. But first let us ask,
to what extent does Western mankind really believe that
this being of Krishna once appeared before Arjuna and spoke
those words? We are now at the starting-point of a con-
cept of the world that will lead us on until this is no mere
matter of belief, but of knowledge. We are however only at
the beginning of this anthroposophical concept of the world
that will lead us to knowledge. The second picture is much
nearer to us. It contains something to which Western civili-
zation can respond.

We look back some five centuries before the founding of
Christianity to a soul whom one of the greatest spirits of
Western lands made the central figure of all his thought and
writing. We look back to Socrates. We look to him in the
spirit in the hour of his death, even as Plato describes
him in the circle of his disciples in the famous discourse on

8

the immortality of the soul. In this picture there are but
slight indications of the beyond, represented in the “dai-
mon” who speaks*to Socrates.

Now let him stand before us in the hours that preceded
his entrance into the spiritual worlds. There he is, sur-
rounded by his disciples, and in the face of death he speaks
to them of the immortality of the soul. Many people read
this wonderful discourse that Plato has given us in order to
describe the scene of his dying teacher. But people in these
days read only words, only concepts and ideas. There are
even those — I do not mean to censure them — in whom this
wonderful scene of Plato arouses questions as to the logi-
cal justification of what the dying Socrates sets forth to his
disciples. They cannot feel there is something more for the
human soul, that something more important lives there, of
far greater significance than logical proofs and scientific
arguments. Let us imagine all that Socrates says on immor-
tality to be spoken by a man of great culture, depth and re-
finement, in the circle of his pupils, but in a different situa-
tion from that of Socrates, under different circumstances.
Even if the words of this man were a hundred times more
logically sound than those of Socrates, in spite of all they will
perhaps have a hundred times less value. This will only
be fully grasped when people begin to understand that there
is something for the human soul of more value, even if less
plausible, than the most strictly correct logical demonstra-
tions. If any highly educated and cultured man speaks to
his pupils on the immortality of the soul, it can indeed have
significance. But its significance is not revealed in what
he says — I know I am now saying something paradoxical
but it is true — its significance depends also on the fact that
the teacher, having spoken these words to his pupils, passes
on to look after the ordinary affairs of life, and his pupils do

9

the same. But Socrates speaks in the hour that immediately
precedes his passage through the gates of death. He gives
out his teaching in a moment when in the next instant his
soul is to be severed from his bodily form.

It is one thing to speak about immortality to the pupils
he is leaving behind in the hour of his own death — which
does not meet him unexpectedly but as an event pre-
determined by destiny — and another thing to return after
such a discourse to the ordinary business of living. It is
not the words of Socrates that should work on us as much as
the situation under which he speaks them. Let us take all
the power of this scene, all that we receive from Socrates’
conversation with his pupils on immortality, the full im-
mediate force of this picture. What do we have before us?
It is the world of everyday life in Greek times; the world
whose conflicts and struggles led to the result that the best
of the country’s sons was condemned to drink the hemlock.
This noble Greek spoke these last words with the sole in-
tention of bringing the souls of the men around him to be-
lieve in what they could no longer have knowledge; believe
in what was for them “a beyond,” a spiritual world. That
it needs a Socrates to lead the earthly souls until they gain
an outlook into the spiritual worlds, that it needs him to
do this by means of the strongest proofs, that is, by
his deed, is something that is indeed comprehensible to
Western souls. They can gain an understanding for the So-
cratic culture. We only grasp Western civilization in a
right sense when we recognize that in this respect it has
been a Socratic civilization throughout the-centuries.

Now let us think of one of the pupils of Socrates who
could certainly have no doubt of the reality of all that sur-
rounded him, being a Greek, and compare him with
Krishna’s disciple Arjuna. Think how the Greek has to be

io

introduced to the supersensible world, and then think of
Arjuna who can have no doubt whatever about it but be-
comes confused instead with the sense-world, almost doubt-
ing the possibility of its existence. I know that history,
philosophy and other branches of knowledge may say with
apparently good reason, “Yes, but if you will only look at
what is written in the Bhagavad Gita, and in Plato’s works,
it is just as easy to prove the opposite of what you have just
said.” I know too that those who speak like this do not want
to feel the deeper impulses, the mighty impulses that arise
on the one hand from that picture out of the Bhagavad Gita,
and on the other from that of the dying Socrates as described
by Plato. A deep gulf yawns between these two worlds in
spite of all the similarity that can be discovered. This is be-
cause the Bhagavad Gita marks the end of the age of the
ancient clairvoyance. There we can catch the last echo of
it; while in the dying Socrates we meet one of the first of
those who through thousands of years have wrestled with
another kind of human knowledge, with those ideas,
thoughts and feelings that, so to say, were thrown off by the
old clairvoyance and have continued to evolve in the inter-
vening time, because they have to prepare the way for
a new clairvoyance. Today we are striving toward this new
clairvoyance by giving out and receiving what we call the
anthroposophical conception of the world. From a certain
aspect we may say that no gulf is deeper than the one that
opens between Arjuna and a disciple of Socrates.

Now we are living in a time when the souls of men, hav-
ing gone through manifold transformations and incarna-
tions in the search for life in external knowledge, are now
once more seeking to make connection with the spiritual
worlds. The fact that you are sitting here is most living
proof that your own souls are seeking this reunion. You are

n

seeking the connection that will lead you up in a new
way to those worlds so wondrously revealed to us in the
words of Krishna to his disciple Arjuna. So there is much
in the occult wisdom on which the Bhagavad Gita is founded
that resounds to us as something responding to our deepest
longings. In ancient times the soul was well aware of the
bond that unites it with the spiritual. It was at home in the
supersensible. We now are at the beginning of an age
wherein men’s souls will once more seek access in a new way
to the spiritual worlds. We must feel ourselves stimulated
to this search when we think of how we once had this ac-
cess, that it once was there for man. Indeed, we shall find
it to an unusual degree in the revelations of the holy song
of the East.

As is generally the case with the great works of man, we
find the opening words of the Bhagavad Gita full of mean-
ing. (Are not the opening words of the Iliad and the
Odyssey most significant?) The story is told by his chariot-
eer to the blind king, the chief of the Kurus who are en-
gaged in fratricidal battle with the Pandavas. A blind chief-
tain! This already seems symbolical. Men of ancient times
had vision into the spiritual worlds. With their whole heart
and soul they lived in connection with Gods and Divine Be-
ings. Everything that surrounded them in the earthly sphere
was to them in unceasing connection with divine existence.
Then came another age, and just as Greek legend depicts
Homer as a blind man, so the Gita tells us of the blind chief
of the Kurus. It is to him that the discourses of Krishna are
narrated in which he instructs Arjuna concerning what
goes on in the world of the senses. He must even be told of
those things of the sense-world that are projections into it
from the spiritual. There is a deeply significant symbol in
the fact that old men who looked back with perfect memory

12

and a perfect spiritual connection into a primeval past, were
blind, to the world immediately around them. They were
seers in the spirit, seers in the soul. They could experi-
ence as though in lofty pictures all that lived as spiritual
mysteries. Those who were to understand the events of the
world in their spiritual connections were pictured to us in the
old songs and legends as blind. Thus we find this same sym-
bol in the Greek singer Homer as in that figure that meets us
at the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita. This introduces us to
the age of transition from primeval humanity to that of the
present day.

Now why is Arjuna so deeply moved by the impending
battle of the brothers? We know that the old clairvoyance
was in a sense bound up with external blood relationship.
The flowing of the same blood in the veins of a number of
people was rightly looked upon as something sacred in an-
cient times because with it was connected the ancient per-
ception of a particular group-soul. Those who not only felt
but knew their blood-relationship to one another did not yet
have such an ego as lives in men of the present time.
Wherever we look in those ancient times we find everywhere
groups of people who did not at all feel themselves as hav-
ing an individual “I” as man does today. Each felt his iden-
tity only in the group, in a community based upon the blood-
bond.

What does the folk-soul, the nation-soul, signify to a man
today? Certainly it is often an object of the greatest en-
thusiasm. Yet we may say that, compared with the individ-
ual “I” of a man, this nation-soul does not really count.
This may be a hard saying but it is true. Once upon a time
man did not say “I” to himself but to his tribal or racial
group. This group-soul feeling was still living in Arjuna
when he saw the fratricidal battle raging around him. That

13

is the reason why the battle that raged about him filled him
with such horror.

Let us enter the soul of Arjuna and feel the horror that
lived in him when he realized how those who belonged to-
gether are about to murder each other. He felt what lived
in all the souls at that time and is about to kill itself. He felt
as a soul would feel if its body, which is its very own, were
being torn in pieces. He felt as though the members of one
body were in conflict, the heart with the head, the left hand
with the right. Think how Arjuna’s soul confronted the im-
pending battle as a battle against its own body, when, in the
moment he drops his bow, the conflict of the kinsmen seems
to him a conflict between a man’s right hand and his left.
Then you will feel the atmosphere of the opening verses of
the Bhagavad Gita.

When Arjuna is in this mood he is met by the great
teacher Krishna. Here we must call attention to the incom-
parable art with which Krishna is pictured in this scene:
The holy God, who stands there teaching Arjuna what man
shall and will discard if he would take the right direction in
his evolution. Of what does Krishna speak? Of I, and
I, and I, and always only of I. “I am in the earth, I am in
the water, I am in the air, I am in the fire, in all souls, in all
manifestations of life, even in the holy Aum. I am the wind
that blows through the forests. I am the greatest of the
mountains, of the rivers. I am the greatest among men. I am
all that is best in the old seer Kapila.” Truly Krishna says
nothing less than this, “I recognize nothing else than my-
self, and I admit the world’s existence only in so far as it is
//” Nothing else than / speaks from out the teaching of
Krishna.

Let us once for all see quite plainly how Arjuna stands
there as one not yet understanding himself as an ego but

14

who now has to do so. How the God confronts him like an all-
embracing cosmic egoist, admitting of nothing but himself,
even requiring others to admit of nothing but themselves,
each one an “I.” Yes, in all that is in earth, water, fire or air,
in all that lives upon the earth, in the three worlds, we are
to see nothing but Krishna.

It is full of significance for us that one who cannot yet
grasp the ego is brought for his instruction before a Being
who demands to be recognized only as his own Self. Let
him who wants to see this in the light of truth read the Bha-
gavad Gita through and try to answer the question, “How
can we designate what Krishna says of himself and for which
he demands recognition?” It is universal egoism that speaks
in Krishna. It does indeed seem to us as though through the
whole of the sublime Gita this refrain resounds to our spirit-
ual hearing, “Only when you recognize, you men, my all-
embracing egoism, only then can salvation be for you! ”

The greatest achievements of human spiritual life always
set us riddles. We only see them in the right light when we
recognize that they set us the very greatest riddles. Truly,
a hard one seems to be given us when we are now confronted
with the task of understanding how a most sublime teaching
can be bound up with the announcement of universal ego-
ism. It is not through logic but in the perception of the great
contradictions in life that the occult mysteries unveil them-
selves to us. It will be our task to get beyond what seems
so strange and come to the truth within the Maya.

When we are speaking within Maya we must recognize
what it really is that we may rightly call a universal egoism.
Through this very riddle we must reach out from illusion
into reality, into the light of truth. How this is possible, and
how we may surmount this riddle and reach reality, will
form the subject of the following lectures.

II

The MORE deeply we penetrate into the occult records
of the various ages and peoples, that is to say, into the truly
occult records, the more we are struck by one feature of
them which meets us again and again. I have already indi-
cated it in discussing the Gospel of St. John, and again on a
later occasion in speaking of the Gospel of St. Mark. I refer
to the fact that on looking deeply into any such occult rec-
ord it becomes ever clearer that it is really most wonder-
fully composed, that it forms an artistic whole. I could
show, for instance, how St. John’s Gospel, when we penetrate
into its depths, reveals a wonderful, artistic composition.
With remarkable dramatic power the story is carried up
stage by stage to a great climax, and then continues from
this point onward with a kind of renewal of dramatic power
to the end. You can study this in the lectures I gave at Cas-
sel on St. John’s Gospel in relation to the three other Gos-
pels, especially to that according to St. Luke.

Most impressive is the gradual enhancement of the whole
composition while the supersensible is placed before us in
the so-called miracles and signs; each working up in ever-
increasing wonder to the sign that meets us in the initiation
of Lazarus. It makes us realize how we can always find ar-
tistic beauty at the foundation of these occult records. I

16

could show the same for the structure of St. Mark’s Gospel.
When we regard such records in their beauty of form and
their dramatic power, we can indeed conclude that just be-
cause they are true such records cannot be other than
artistically, beautifully composed, in the deepest sense of
the word. For the moment we will only indicate this fact, as
we may come back to it in the course of these lectures.

Now it is remarkable that the same thing meets us again
in the Bhagavad Gita. There is a wonderful intensification
of the narrative, one might say, a hidden artistic beauty in
the song, so that if nothing else were to touch the soul of
one studying this sublime Gita, he still could not help be-
ing impressed by its marvellous composition. Let us begin
by indicating a few of the outstanding points — and we will
confine ourselves today to the first four discourses — be-
cause these points are important both for the artistic struc-
ture and the deep occult truths that it contains.

First of all Arjuna meets us. Facing the bloodshed in
which he is to take part, he grows weak. He sees all that is
to take place as a battle of brothers against brothers,
his blood relations. He shrinks back. He will not fight
against them. While fear and terror come over him and he
is horror-stricken, his charioteer suddenly appears as the
instrument through which Krishna, God, is to speak to
him. Here in this first episode we already have a mo-
ment of great intensity and also an indication of deep oc-
cult truth. Anyone who finds the way, by whatever path,
into the spiritual worlds, even though he may have gone
only a few steps — or even had only a dim presentiment
of the way to be experienced — such a person will be aware
of the deep significance of this moment.

As a rule we cannot enter the spiritual worlds without
passing through a deep upheaval in our souls. We have to

17

experience something which disturbs and shakes all our
forces, filling us with intense feeling. Emotions that are
generally spread out over many moments, over long peri-
ods of living, whose permanent effect on the soul is therefore
weaker — such feelings are concentrated in a single moment
and storm through us with tremendous force when we en-
ter the occult worlds. Then we experience a kind of inner
shattering, which can indeed be compared to fear, terror
and anxiety, as though we were shrinking back from some-
thing almost with horror. Such experiences belong to the
initial stages of occult development, to entering the spirit-
ual worlds. It is just for this reason that such great care
must be taken to give the right advice to those who would
enter the spiritual worlds through occult training. Such a
person must be prepared so that he may experience this up-
heaval as a necessary event in his soul life without its en-
croaching on his bodily life and health, because his body
must not suffer a like upheaval. That is the essential thing.
We must learn to suffer the convulsions of our soul with
outward equanimity and calm.

This is true not only for our bodily processes. The soul
forces we need for everyday living, our ordinary intellectual
powers, even those of imagination, of feeling and will — these
too must not be allowed to become unbalanced. The up-
heaval that may be the starting-point for occult life must
take place in far deeper layers of the soul, so that we go
through our external life as before, without anything being
noticed in us outwardly, while within we may be living
through whole worlds of shattering soul-experience. That
is what it means to be ripe for occult development: To be
able to experience such inward convulsions without losing
one’s outer balance and calm. To this end a person who is
striving to become ripe for occult development must widen

the circle of his interests beyond his everyday life. He must
get away from that to which he is ordinarily attached from
morning to night,, and reach out to interests that move on
the great horizon of the world.

We must be able to undergo the experience of doubting
all truth and all knowledge. We must have the power to do
this with the same intensity of feeling people generally
have only where their everyday interests are concerned. We
must be able to feel with the destiny of all mankind, with
as much interest as we usually feel in our own destiny, or
perhaps in that of our nearest connections of family, na-
tion or race. If we cannot do this, we are not yet completely
ready for occult development.

For this reason modern anthroposophy, if pursued ear-
nestly and worthily, is the right preparation in our age for a
true occult development. Let those who are absorbed in
the petty material interests of the immediate present, who
cannot find sufficient interest to follow the anthroposophist
in looking out over world and planetary destinies, over
the historical epochs and races of mankind — let them
scoff if they will! One who would prepare himself for an oc-
cult development must lift up his eyes to the heights where
the interests of mankind, of the earth, of the whole plane-
tary system become his own. When a person’s interests are
gradually sharpened and widened through the study of an-
throposophy, which leads even without occult training to an
understanding of occult truths, then he is being rightly pre-
pared for an occult path.

In our time there are many who have such interests for
the whole of mankind. More often they are not to be found
among the intellectuals but are people who appear to lead
quite simple lives. Yes, there are many today who have a
bumble place in life and as if by natural instinct feel this

19

interest in the whole of mankind. That is why anthro-
posophy is in such harmony with the spirit of our age.

First, then, we must learn of the mighty upheaval of the
soul that has to come at the beginning of occult experience.
With wonderful truth the Bhagavad Gita sets such a mo-
ment of upheaval at the starting-point of Arjuna’s experi-
ence, only he does not go through an occult training but is
placed into this moment by his destiny. He is placed into
the battle without being able to recognize its necesssity, its
purpose or its aim. All he sees is that blood relations are
about to fight against each other. Such a soul as Arjuna
can be shaken by that to its innermost core, for he has to
say to himself, “Brother fights against brother. Surely then
all the tribal customs will be shaken and then the tribe it-
self will wither away and be destroyed, and all its morality
fall into decay! Those laws will be shaken that in accord-
ance with an eternal destiny place men into castes; and then
will everything be imperilled — man himself, the law, the
whole world. The whole significance of mankind will be in
the balance.” Such is his feeling. It is as though the ground
were about to sink from under his feet, as though an abyss
were opening up before him.

Arjuna was a man who had received into his feeling some-
thing that the man of today no longer knows, but that in
those ancient times was a primeval teaching of tradition.
He knew that what is handed on from generation to genera-
tion in mankind is bound up with the woman nature; while
the individual, personal qualities whereby a man stands out
from his blood connections and his family line are bound up
with the man nature. What a man inherits as common, ge-
neric qualities is handed on to the descendants by the
woman, whereas what forms him into an unique, individual
being, tearing him out of the generic succession, is the part

20

he receives from his father. “Must it not then have an evil
effect on the laws that rule woman’s nature,” says Arjuna to
himself, “if blood fights against blood?”

There is another feeling that Arjuna has absorbed, on
which for him the whole well-being of human evolution de-
pends. He feels that the forefathers of the tribe, the ances-
tors, are worthy of honor. He feels that their souls watch
over the succeeding generations. For him it is a sublime
service to offer up fires of sacrifice to the Manes, to the holy
souls of the ancestors. But now what must he see? Instead
of altars with sacrificial fires burning on them for the an-
cestors, he sees those who should join in kindling such fires
assailing one another in battle. If we would understand
a human soul we must penetrate into its thoughts. Above
all we must enter deeply into its feelings because it is in
feeling that the soul is intimately bound up with its very
life. Now think of the great contrast between all that Ar-
juna would naturally feel, and the bloody battle of brother
against brother that is actually about to take place. Destiny
is hammering at Arjuna’s soul, shaking it to its very depths.
It is as though he had to gaze down into a terrible abyss.
Such an upheaval awakens the forces of the soul and brings
it to a vision of occult realities that at other times are hid-
den as behind a veil. That is what gives such dramatic inten-
sity to the Bhagavad Gita. The ensuing discourse is thus
placed before us with wonderful power, as developing of
necessity out of Arjuna’s destiny, instead of being given us
merely as an academic, pedantic course of instruction in
occultism.

Now that Arjuna has been rightly prepared for the birth of
the deeper forces of his soul, now that he can see these
forces in inward vision, there happens what everyone who has
the power to behold it will understand: His charioteer be-

21

comes the instrument through which the god Krishna speaks
to him. In the first four discourses we observe three succes-
sive stages, each higher than the last, each one introducing
something new. Here in these very first discourses we find
an accent that is wonderful in its dramatic art, apart from
the fact that it corresponds to a deep occult truth. The first
stage is a teaching that might appear even trivial to many
Westerners in its given form. Let us admit that at once.
(Here I should like to remark, especially for the benefit of
my dear friends here in Finland, that I mean by “Western”
all that lies to the west of the Ural Mountains, the Volga, the
Caspian Sea and Asia Minor — in fact the whole of Europe.
What is to be called Eastern land belongs essentially in
Asia. Of course, America too forms part of the West.)

To begin with then we find a teaching that might easily
appear trivial, especially to a philosophical mind. For what
is the first thing that Krishna says to Arjuna as a word of
exhortation for the battle? “Look there,” he says, “at those
who are to be killed by you; those in your own ranks who are
to be killed and those who are to remain behind, and con-
sider well this one thing. What dies and what remains
alive in your ranks and in those of the enemy is but the outer
physical body. The spirit is eternal. If your warriors slay
those in the ranks over there they are but slaying the outer
body, they are not killing the spirit, which is eternal. The
spirit goes from change to change, from incarnation to in-
carnation. It is eternal. This deepest being of man is not
affected in this battle. Rise, Arjuna, rise to the spirit-
ual standpoint, then you can go and give yourself up to your
duty. You need not shudder nor be sad at heart, for in kill-
ing your enemies you are not killing their essential being.”

Thus speaks Krishna, and at first hearing his words are
in a sense trivial, though in a special way. In many

22

respects the Westerner is short-sighted in his thinking
and consciousness. He never stops to consider that every-
thing is evolving. If he says that Krishna’s exhortation, as I
have expressed it, is trivial, it is as though one were to say,
“Why do they honor Pythagoras as such a great man when
every schoolboy and girl knows his theorem?” It would be
stupid to conclude that Pythagoras was not a great
man in having discovered his theorem just because every
schoolboy understands it! We see how stupid this is, but
we do not notice when we fail to realize that what any West-
ern philosopher may repeat by rote as the wisdom of
Krishna — that the spirit is eternal, immortal — was a sub-
lime wisdom at the time Krishna revealed it. Souls like
Arjuna did indeed feel that blood-relations ought not to
fight. They still felt the common blood that flowed in a
group of people. To hear it said that “the spirit is eternal”
(spirit in the sense of what is generally conceived, ab-
stractly, as the center of man’s being) — the spirit is eternal
and undergoes transformations, passing from incarnation
to incarnation — this stated in abstract and intellectual terms
was something absolutely new and epoch-making in its new-
ness when it resounded in Arj una’s soul through Krishna’s
words. All the people in Arjuna’s environment believed
definitely in reincarnation, but as Krishna taught it, as a
general and abstract idea, it was new, especially in regard
to Arjuna’s situation. This is one reason why we had to say
that such a truth can only be called “trivial” in a spe-
cial sense. That holds true in another respect as well. Our
abstract thought, which we use even in the pursuit of pop-
ular science, which we regard today as quite natural —
this thinking activity was by no means always so natural
and simple.

In order to illustrate what I say, let me give you a radical

23

example. You will think it strange that while for all of you
it is quite natural to speak of a “fish,” it was by no means
natural for primitive peoples to do so. Primitive peoples
are acquainted with trout and salmon, cod and herring, but
“fish” they do not know. They have no such word as
“fish,” because their thought does not extend to such ab-
stract generalization. They know individual trees, but
“tree” they do not know. Thinking in such general concepts
is by no means natural to primitive races even in the present
time. This mode of thinking has indeed only entered hu-
manity in the course of its evolution. In fact, one who con-
siders why it was that logic first began in the time of ancient
Greece, could scarcely be surprised when the statement is
made on occult grounds that logical thinking has only
existed since the period that followed, the original composi-
tion of the Bhagavad Gita. Krishna impels Arjuna to logi-
cal thought, to thinking in abstractions, as if to a new thing
that is only now to enter humanity.

But this activity of thought that man has developed and
takes quite for granted today, people have the most dis-
torted and unnatural notions about. Western philosophers
in particular have most distorted ideas about thought, for
they generally take it to be merely a photographic repro-
duction of external sense reality. They imagine that con-
cepts and ideas and the whole inner thinking of man simply
arises in him out of the external physical world. While li-
braries of philosophical words have been written in the West
to prove that thought is merely something having its origin
in the stimulus of the external physical world, it is only in
our time that thought will be valued for what it really is.

Here I reach a point that is most important for those who
would undergo an occult development in their own souls.
I want to make every effort to get this point clear. The

24

medieval alchemists used to say — I cannot now discuss what
they really meant by it — that gold could be made from all
metals, gold in any desired amount, but that one must first
have a minute quantity of it. Without that one could not
make gold. Whether or not this is true of gold, it is certainly
true of clairvoyance. No man could actually attain clairvoy-
ance if he did not have a tiny amount of it already in his
soul. It is generally supposed that men as they are are not
clairvoyant. If that were true they could never become
clairvoyant at all, because just as the alchemist thought that
one must have a little gold to conjure forth large quantities,
so must one already be a little clairvoyant in order to be able
to develop and extend it more and more. Now you may see
two alternatives here and ask, “Do you think then that we
all are clairvoyant, if only slightly, or, do you think that
those of us who are not clairvoyant can never become so?”
This is just the point. It is most important to understand
that there is really no one among you who does not have
this starting-point of clairvoyance, though you may not be
conscious of it. All of you have it. None of you is lacking in
it. What is this that all possess? It is something not gen-
erally regarded or valued as clairvoyance. Let me make a
rather crude comparison.

If a pearl is lying in the roadway and a chicken finds it,
the chicken does not value the pearl. Most men and women
today are chickens in this respect. They do not value the
pearl that lies there in full view before them. What they
value is something quite different. They value their con-
cepts and ideas, but no one could think abstractly, could
have thoughts and ideas, if he were not clairvoyant. In our
ordinary thinking the pearl of clairvoyance is contained from
the start. Ideas arise in the soul through exactly the

25

same process as what gives rise to its highest powers. It is
immensely important to learn to understand that clairvoy-
ance begins in something common and everyday. We only
have to recognize the supersensible nature of our concepts
and ideas. We must realize that these come to us from the
supersensible worlds; only then can we look at the matter
rightly.

When I tell you of the higher hierarchies, of Seraphim and
Cherubim and Thrones, right down to Archangels and An-
gels, these are beings who must speak to the human soul
from higher spiritual worlds. It is from those worlds
that concepts and ideas come into the human soul, not from
the world of the senses. In the 18th century what was con-
sidered a great word was uttered by a pioneer of thinking,
“O, Man, make bold to use thy power of reason!” To-
day a great word must resound in men’s souls, “O, Man,
make bold to claim thy concepts and ideas as the begin-
ning of thy clairvoyance.” What I have just expressed I
said many years ago, publicly in my books Truth and
Science and The Philosophy of Freedom, where I showed
that human ideas come from supersensible, spiritual knowl-
edge. It was not understood at the time, and no wonder, for
those who should have understood it were — well, like the
chickens! We must realize that at the moment when
Krishna stands before Arjuna and gives him the power of
abstract judgment, he is thereby giving him, for the first
time in the whole of evolution, the starting-point for the
knowledge of higher worlds. The spirit can be seen on the
very surface of the changes that take place within the ex-
ternal world of sense. Bodies die; the spirit, the abstract,
the essential being, is eternal. The spiritual can be seen
playing on the surface of phenomena. This is what Krishna

26

would reveal to Arjuna as the beginning of a new clairvoy-
ance for men.

One thing is necessary for men of today if they would at-
tain to an inwardly-experienced truth. They must have
once passed through the feeling of the fleeting nature of all
outer transformations. They must have experienced the
mood of infinite sadness, of infinite tragedy, and at the same
time the exultation of joy. They must have felt the breath
of the ephemeral that streams out from all things. They
must have been able to fix their interest on this coming forth
and passing away again, the transitoriness of the world of
sense. Then, when they have been able to feel the deepest
pain and the fullest delight in the external world, they
must once have been absolutely alone — alone with their con-
cepts and ideas. They must have had the feeling, “In these
concepts I grasp the mystery of the worlds; I take hold of
the outer edge of cosmic being,” — the very expression I
once used in my Philosophy of Freedom 1 This must be ex-
perienced, not merely understood intellectually, and if you
would experience it, it must be in deepest loneliness. Then
you have another feeling. On the one hand you experience
the majesty of the world of ideas that is spread out over the
All. On the other hand you experience with the deepest bit-
terness that you have to separate yourself from space and
time in order to be together with your concepts and ideas.
Loneliness! It is the icy cold of loneliness. Furthermore,
it comes to you that the world of ideas has now drawn to-
gether as in a single point of this loneliness. Now you say,
I am alone with my world of ideas. You become utterly be-
wildered in your world of ideas, an experience that stirs
you to the depths of your soul. At length you say to yourself,
“Perhaps all this is only I myself; perhaps the only truth

27

about these laws is that they exist in the point of my own
loneliness.” Thus you experience, infinitely enhanced, ut-
ter doubt in all existence.

When you have this experience in your world of ideas,
when the full cup of doubt in all existence has been poured
out with pain and bitterness over your soul, then only are
you ripe to understand how, after all, it is not the infinite
spaces and periods of time of the physical world from which
your ideas have come. Now only, after the bitterness of
doubt, you open yourself to the regions of the spiritual and
know that your doubt was justified, and in what sense it was
justified. For it had to be, since you imagined that the ideas
had come into your soul from the times and spaces of the
physical world. How do you now feel your world of ideas
having experienced its origin in the spiritual worlds? Now
for the first time you feel yourself inspired. Before, you
were feeling the infinite void spread around you like a dark
abyss. Now you begin to feel that you are standing on a
rock that rises up out of the abyss. You know with
certainty, “Now I am connected with the spiritual worlds.
They, not the world of sense, have bestowed on me my world
of ideas.”

This is the next stage for the evolving soul. It is the stage
where man begins to be deeply in earnest with what has to-
day come to be a trivial, commonplace truth. To bear this
feeling in your heart will prepare you to receive in a true
way the first truth that Krishna gives to Arjuna after the
mighty upheaval and convulsion in his soul: The truth of
the eternal spirit living through outer transformations. To
abstract understanding we speak in concepts and ideas.
Krishna speaks to Arjuna’s heart. What may be trivial and
commonplace for the understanding is infinitely deep and
sublime to the heart of man.

28

We see how the first stage shows itself at once as a neces-
sary consequence of the deeply moving experience that is
presented to us at the start of the Bhagavad Gita . Now
the next stage.

It is easy to speak of what is often called dogma in
occultism — something that is accepted in blind faith and
given out as gospel truth. Let me suggest to you that it
would be quite simple for someone to come forward and say,
“This fellow has published a book on Occult Science, speak-
ing in it about Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, and there is
no way of controlling these statements. They can only be
accepted as dogma.” I could understand such a thing being
said, because it corresponds to the superficial nature of our
age; and there is no getting away from it, our age is su-
perficial. Indeed, under certain conditions this objection
would not be without foundation. It would be justified, for
example, if you were to tear out of the book all the pages
that precede the chapter on the Saturn evolution. If any-
one were to begin reading the book at this chapter it would
be nothing but dogma. If, however, the author prefaces it
with the other chapters, he is by no means a dogmatist be-
cause he shows what paths the soul has to go through in
order to reach such conceptions. That is the point, that
it has been shown in the book how every individual man, if
he reaches into the depths of his soul, is bound to come to
such conceptions. Herein all dogmatism ceases.

Thus we can feel it natural that Krishna, having brought
Arjuna into the world of ideas and wishing to lead him on
into the occult world, now goes on to show him the next
stage, how every soul can reach that higher world if it finds
the right starting-point. Krishna then must begin by re-
jecting every form of dogmatism, and he does so radically.
Here we come up against a hard saying by Krishna. He ab-

29

solutely rejects what for centuries had been most holy to the
highest men of that age — the contents of the Vedas. He
says, “Hold not to the Vedas, nor to the word of the Vedas.
Hold fast to Yogal” That is to say, “Hold fast to what is
within thine own soul ! ”

Let us grasp what Krishna means by this exhortation. He
does not mean that the contents of the Vedas are untrue.
He does not want Arjuna to accept what is given in the Ve-
das dogmatically as the disciples of the Veda teaching do.
He wants to inspire him to take his start from the very first
original point whence the human soul evolves. For this pur-
pose all dogmatic wisdom must be laid aside. We can imag-
ine Krishna saying to himself that even though Arjuna will
in the end reach the very same wisdom that is contained
in the Vedas, still he must be drawn away from them, for
he must go his own way, beginning with the sources in his
own soul. Krishna rejects the Vedas, whether their content
is true or untrue. Arjuna’s path must start from himself,
through his own inwardness he must come to recognize
Krishna. Arjuna must be assumed to have in himself what
a man can and must have if he is really to enter into the
concrete truths of the supersensible worlds. Krishna has
called Arjuna’s attention to something that from then on-
ward is a common attribute of humanity. Having led him to
this point he must lead him further and bring him to recog-
nize what he is to achieve through Yoga. Thus, Arjuna must
first undergo Yoga. Here the poem rises to another level.

In this second stage we see how the Bhagavad Gita goes
on through the first four discourses with ever-increasing
dramatic impulse, coming at length to what is most indi-
vidual of all. Krishna describes the path of Yoga to Arjuna.
We shall speak of this more in detail tomorrow. He de-
scribes the path that Arjuna must take in order to pass

30

from the everyday clairvoyance of concepts and ideas to
what can only be attained through Yoga. Concepts only
require to be placed in the right light; but Arjuna has to
be guided to Yoga. This is the second stage.

The third stage shows once more an enhancement of
dramatic power, and again comes the expression of a deep
occult truth. Let us assume that someone really takes the
Yoga path. He will rise at length from his ordinary con-
sciousness to a higher state of consciousness, which in-
cludes not only the ego that lies between the limits of birth
and death but what passes from one incarnation to the next.
The soul wakens to know itself in an expanded ego. It
grows into a wider consciousness. The soul goes through a
process that is essentially an everyday process but that is
not experienced fully in our everyday life because man
goes to sleep every night. The sense world fades out around
him and he becomes unconscious of it. Now for every
human soul the possibility exists of letting this world of
sense vanish from his consciousness as it does when he
goes to sleep, and then to live in higher worlds as in an ab-
solute reality. Thereby man rises to a high level of con-
sciousness. We shall still have to speak of Yoga, and also
of the modern exercises that make this possible. But when
man gradually attains to where he no longer, consciously,
lives and feels and knows in hints el], but lives and feels
and knows together with the whole earth, then he grows
into a higher level of consciousness where the things of the
sense world vanish for him as they do in sleep.

However, before man can attain this level he must be
able to identify himself with the soul of his planet, earth.
We shall see that this is possible. We know that man not
only experiences the rhythm of sleeping and waking but
other rhythms of the earth as well — of summer and win-

31

ter. When one follows the path of Yoga or goes through a
modern occult training, he can lift himself above the ordi-
nary consciousness that experiences the cycles of sleeping
and waking, summer and winter. He can learn to look at
himself from outside. He becomes aware of being able to
look back at himself just as he ordinarily looks at things
outside himself. Now he observes the things, the cycles in
external life. He sees alternating conditions. He realizes
how his body, so long as he is outside himself, takes on a
form similar to that of the earth in summer with all its
vegetation. What material science discovers and calls
nerves he begins to perceive as a sprouting forth of some-
thing plant-like at the time of going to sleep, and when he
returns again into everyday consciousness he feels how
this plant-like life shrinks together again and becomes the
instrument for thinking, feeling and willing in his waking
consciousness. He feels his going out from the body and
returning into it analogous to the alternation of summer
and winter on the earth. In effect he feels something sum-
merlike in going to sleep and something winter-like in wak-
ing up — not as one might imagine, the opposite way round.
From this moment onward he learns to understand what
the spirit of the earth is, and how it is asleep in summer
and awake in winter, not vice versa. He realizes the won-
derful experience of identifying himself with the spirit of
the earth. From this moment he says to himself, “I live
not only inside my skin, but as a cell lives in my bodily
organism so do I live in the organism of the earth. The
earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter as I am
asleep and awake in the alternation of night and day. And
as the cell is to my consciousness, so am I to the conscious-
ness of the earth.”

The path of Yoga, especially in its modern sense, leads

32

to this expansion of consciousness, to the identification of
our own being with a more comprehensive being. We feel
ourselves interwoven with the whole earth. Then as men
we no longer feel ourselves bound to a particular time and
place, but we feel our humanity such as it has developed
from the very beginning of the earth. We feel the age-long
succession of our evolutions through the course of the evo-
lution of the earth. Thus Yoga leads us on to feel our at-
one-ment with what goes from one incarnation to another
in the earth’s evolution. That is the third stage.

This is the reason for the great beauty in the artistic
composition of the Bhagavad Gita. In its climaxes, its in-
ner artistic form, it reflects deep occult truths. Beginning
with an instruction in the ordinary concepts of our thinking
it goes on to an indication of the path of Yoga. Then at the
third stage to a description of the marvellous expansion of
man’s horizon over the whole earth, where Krishna awakens
in Arjuna the idea, “All that lives in your soul has lived
often before, only you know nothing of it. But I have this
consciousness in myself when I look back on all the trans-
formations through which I have lived, and I will lead you
up so that you may learn to feel yourself as I feel myself.”
A new moment of dramatic force as beautiful as it is deeply
and occultly true !

Thus we come to see the evolution of mankind from out
of its everyday consciousness, from the pearl in the road-
way that only needs to be recognized, from the particular
world of thoughts and concepts that are a matter of every-
day life in any one age, up to the point from where we can
look out over all that we really have in us, which lives on
from incarnation to incarnation on the earth.

33

Ill

In THE last lecture I was trying to show you how the
thinking of the present day, which tends to the formation
of abstract concepts, is not really a gift of the outer physi-
cal world but a gift of the spiritual world. I tried to show
you how at bottom this abstract thinking enters man’s soul
in exactly the same way as the revelations of the Beings of
the Higher Hierarchies. The point then is this, that in our
most ordinary life we really have something in us that is
already of like nature to clairvoyant perception. Now we
have something else in us as well, which is even more akin
to clairvoyant perception even though in a more hidden
way. I mean that consciousness that appears between our
ordinary waking state and our sleeping — our dream con-
sciousness. We cannot become familiar in a practical way
with the ascent of the soul into higher worlds without try-
ing to get a clear idea of the peculiar life that the soul leads
in the twilight consciousness of dreaming. What now is a
dream in reality?

Let us begin by considering the dream pictures we have
around or before us, which in general are more fleeting,
less sharply outlined than the perceptions of ordinary life.
These pictures seem to flit past our souls. When, after-
ward, we come to analyze them objectively we can be struck

34

by the fact that in most cases they have some kind of con-
nection with our life on the physical plane. Of course,
there are people who are only too ready to see something
high and wonderful in their dreams, or to interpret them
at once as revelations of higher worlds. There are those
who really believe that a dream has given them something
altogether new, something that has never been there be-
fore. In most cases we shall be mistaken in interpreting
our dreams in such a way. In our careless haste we fail to
recognize how, after all, some experience or other we have
had on the physical plane more or less recently, or perhaps
even many years ago, has reappeared in the changing,
weaving pictures of our dreams. For this very reason it is
quite easy for the materialistic science of our age to reject
the idea that there is anything remarkable in the revelations
of our dreams, and instead point out that dreams are simply
copies or reflections of what has been experienced in ex-
ternal life. If you are acquainted with the present-day sci-
ence of dreams you will realize that it is always at pains to
prove that a dream contains nothing more than the reflec-
tions of the physical world that the brain carries in itself.
It must be admitted that such an attitude can easily reject
any higher significance in our dream life, showing that the
higher revelations many people claim to have are pictures
characteristic of the age in which they live, pictures that
could not have been seen at all in any other age. So, for
example, people today often dream in images derived from
inventions and discoveries only made in the nineteenth
century. It of course is easily proved that images derived
from external life steal their way into the ever-changing play
of dreams.

A person who would gain a clear idea of his dream ex-
periences, learning something from them to help him in en-

35

tering the occult worlds, must therefore be exceedingly
careful in this realm. He must make a habit of carefully
following out all the hidden connections. If he does so, he
will realize that most of his dreams give him no more than
he has already experienced in the outer world. But it is
just when we become more careful in analyzing our dream
life — and every aspiring occultist should do so — that we
shall gradually begin to notice how one thing or another
wells up before us that we could not possibly have experi-
enced in our external life during this incarnation. One who
follows such indications as are given in my book Knowl-
edge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment will notice
that his dream-life gradually begins to change. His dreams
do actually begin to assume a different character. One of
the first experiences he can have may be the following.

Perhaps he has been thinking for a long time about some
perplexing problem and has at last concluded that his un-
derstanding is not yet equal to solving it, nor is all that he
has been able to learn from external sources adequate for
solving it. Now it will not generally happen that he is im-
mediately conscious of having a dream in which this prob-
lem is solved for him. Even so he will be able to have
a certain higher consciousness at a comparatively early
stage. As if awaking from a dream he will seem to remem-
ber something. He can say to himself, “I have not been
dreaming about this problem, nor was I conscious of a
dream I have had before. Yet a kind of memory is arising
in me. It is as though some being had come near to me
who solved this problem for me by giving or suggesting a
solution.”

One who gradually widens his consciousness by follow-
ing the indications I have given will have this experience
fairly easily. He will recall something he has lived through

36

as though in a dream, and will know that at the time he
was not aware of experiencing it. Such an experience will
seem to shine upward from the depths of his soul and he
will say to himself, “When I was not there with my intelli-
gence, my cleverness, when I was protecting my soul from
the suggestions of my intellect, then my soul had greater
power. My soul could come freely in touch with the solu-
tion of the problem, before which I was powerless with my
intellect and understanding.”

No doubt scientists will often find it easy here too to
give a materialistic explanation for such an experience. But
one who has had it knows full well that what has appeared
to him, emerging like the recollection of a dream experi-
ence, reveals something quite different from a mere remi-
niscence of ordinary life. The whole mood of his soul after-
ward tells him he has never had such an experience before.
It brings him into a wonderful feeling of bliss and elation
to realize that in the depths of his soul something more is
active than is present in his ordinary consciousness. This
recognition can become still more distinct, and it happens
in the following way.

If we carry out energetically the exercises given in my
book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attain-
ment, and if we continue to do so for a long time — even
perhaps for several decades — then an experience may arise
in our soul quite similar to what I have just been describ-
ing. For example, one which is mixed up with the recollec-
tion of an experience in everyday life we had years ago,
perhaps a most disagreeable experience that we felt as a
hard blow of fate and could never recall without pain and
bitterness. Now something like the memory of a dream
arises in our consciousness but it is a strange dream.
It tells us that feelings live within us that drew this bitter

37

experience to us with irresistible force and welcomed it
gladly. Something lives in us that felt a kind of delight in
bringing about all the circumstances that led up to this
stroke of fate. When we have had such a dream remem-
brance, we know full well that while in our usual conscious-
ness, which regulates our external affairs, there has not
been a single moment — not one in the whole course of our
present life — when we did not feel this stroke of fate with
bitter pain. Yet, deep down within us there is something
that stands in quite a different relation to this blow of fate.
It used all its power and magnetic force to draw together
the circumstances needed to bring about this misfortune.
We did not know it at the time. Now we notice that behind
our everyday consciousness another, deeper layer of our
soul life was wisely at work.

If we have such an experience — and we shall have them
if we earnestly carry through the exercises I have indicated
— from then onward we have an extended area of knowl-
edge and conviction. In ordinary life we feel ourselves in
a certain relation to the outer world and the events that
come to us in the course of our destiny. We meet these
events with sympathy and antipathy. In the case men-
tioned this particular blow of fate was felt as a bitter and
hateful experience. We did not know that all the time our
soul had another wider life that had longed to live through
what we felt to be so unwelcome. This feeling is quite dif-
ferent in its quality from any recollection out of ordinary
life, for in our innermost being we are very different from
what we imagine. It is just this difference that now be-
comes evident in our soul. It enters in such a way that we
know it has brought us revelations from realms into which
our everyday consciousness cannot penetrate. It widens
our whole concept of our life of soul. We know then, by

38

experience, that our soul-life contains something far more
than its content within the limits of birth and death. If we
do not penetrate into these deeper regions we have no idea
that beneath the threshold of consciousness we are quite
different beings from what we imagine ourselves to be in
everyday life. When a new, significant feeling thus arises,
the horizon of what we call our world expands into a new
region. We realize why it is that in ordinary life we can
enter it only under certain conditions.

In attempting to describe to you what may be called the
occult development of dream-life, I have set before you
two quite different conditions. Our ordinary dream-life,
that most people experience continually at the border of
sleeping and waking and that is nourished by images of
everyday life, and an altogether new world of inner life that
can arise on going through a certain training. We have the
power to plunge into the regions of dream-life in such a way
as to find a new world dawning upon us, one in which we
have actual experiences of the spiritual worlds. One con-
dition must be fulfilled, however, if we would have these
new experiences between sleeping and waking during the
night. We must be able to exclude the recollections and
images of our ordinary life. So long as these interfere in
this realm of dreams, so long do they make themselves im-
portant in it and block the way to real experiences of the
higher worlds.

Why is it that the images from our everyday life thrust
so insistently into this higher realm? Because, whether
we confess it or not, we have the liveliest interest in all
that concerns our particular selves in the external world.
If some people imagine that they no longer take any spe-
cial interest in their life, that makes no difference at all.
No one who realizes how in this connection people can

39

give themselves up to the grossest illusions, will be misled
by such imaginings. After all, man is closely attached to
the sympathies and antipathies of his everyday life. If you
really try to carry out the exercises I have given for soul
development you will soon realize that it all comes to this,
that you must detach your interest from your everyday
life. People carry out the directions given in Knowledge
of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment in all sorts of
ways. The book is read by many different people, and for
many different reasons, and one’s reason for looking into
it will determine one’s attitude to it. Thus, someone begins
reading perhaps with the most beautiful feelings of how
he may gain insight into the higher worlds. Then his curi-
osity is aroused — and why indeed should we not be curi-
ous about this realm! Curiosity often begins to stir even
if one begins with the most holy feelings. That will only
carry through for a little while, however, for all sorts of
inner feelings begin coming in and make us stop, so we
give it up.

But these feelings that we do not wish to recognize
clearly, and generally interpret wrongly, are just those
connected with sympathies and antipathies. We have to
free ourselves from them in quite another way if we really
mean to carry out these exercises. In fact, we do not free
ourselves from them. That is why we stop doing the exer-
cises. Though we say we want to break free of them we do
not do it, but when a person is really in earnest about doing
the exercises the effect they can have is seen very soon.
His sympathies and antipathies toward life change a little.
I must say this does not happen very often. When it does
happen the change is of very great significance because it
means we are struggling against the very forces that allow
the images from our everyday life to arise in our dreams.

40

They can no longer find their way in if we have come so
far as to alter our sympathies and antipathies in any sphere
of life, no matter which.

This alteration in the forces of sympathy need not occur
in a high realm of life, but in some domain it must be car-
ried out, perhaps in the most everyday affairs. There are
people who say they do their exercises every day, morning
and evening, and for hours at a time, and cannot go even
one step into the spiritual worlds. Sometimes it is difficult
to explain to them how easily one can understand that. In
many cases they only need to realize this fact, that they
are still grumbling about the same things they were grum-
bling about twenty, even thirty years ago, although they
have been doing exercises all the time. The very language
of their grumbling is still the same.

Then there are those who try to apply external means
that can have certain effects in occultism. For example,
they become vegetarians. In spite of all their endeavors to
break away from a liking for meat, however, they attain no
results from continued exercises. They may ascribe it to
quite other reasons, thinking for instance that they need
meat for their body, their brain, and therefore return occa-
sionally to the flesh-pots of Egypt. Let us not imagine that
it is an easy thing to transform one’s sympathies and antip-
athies. To quote a passage from Faust, “Easy it is, yet is
the easy hard.” This is an apt expression of the situation
of the evolving soul that is trying to rise into higher worlds.

It is not a question of changing this or that particular
sympathy of antipathy but of changing any whatsoever.
If we do, then after certain exercises we can enter the do-
main of dream life in such a way that we bring nothing
into it of our everyday sense experiences. Thereby in a
certain sense new experiences have room to enter. When,

4i

through an occult development, we have really gone through
such experiences in practice, we become aware of a certain
layer of consciousness present in us that lies behind the
everyday consciousness with which every person is fa-
miliar. In ordinary life our dreams take place in this sec-
ond layer of consciousness, “dream-consciousness,” but
it only becomes such through our carrying into it what we
experience from our waking consciousness. If, however,
we hold back all our everyday experiences from this region
then experiences from the higher worlds can enter. These
higher experiences are present in our surrounding world
here every day. When they first arise we begin to realize
that our everyday consciousness itself seems like a dream
compared to the reality of those experiences. We find that
reality only begins on that higher level.

Returning to the example of suffering a blow of fate that
subsequently caused such bitter feelings, let us try to un-
derstand how one actually comes to realize the beginning
of higher consciousness. Along with this bitterness we no-
tice that there was something in us that sought out this
misfortune, even feeling the need of it for our development.
Now for the first time we realize in practice what karma
is. We entered this incarnation with an imperfection in
our soul. We felt it deeply, and thus were drawn by a
magnetic power toward this blow of fate. By fully experi-
encing it we have mastered and done away with the im-
perfection. That is something real, and important. How
superficial then is everyday judgment in creating a feeling
of antipathy toward the misfortune. Here rather is the
higher reality: Our soul goes forward from one life to an-
other. How short is the time in which it can feel antipathy
toward a blow of fate! When it looks out beyond the hori-
zon of this incarnation, it feels one thing only to be neces-

42

sary, to become ever more perfect. This feeling is stronger
than any we have in our ordinary consciousness. Ordi-
narily, if it had been confronted previously by this blow
of fate it would have slunk past it like a coward, would not
have chosen the compensating necessity. But the deeper
consciousness of which we know nothing does not do this.
Instead it seeks its destiny, and feels it as a process of
growth toward perfection. It says, “I entered into this life.
I was aware of an imperfection that has been in my soul
since birth. If I would develop my soul this imperfection
must be remedied, but to do this I must go on to meet this
misfortune. I must seek it out.”

There we have the stronger element in the soul, com-
pared to which the web of ordinary life with all its sympa-
thies and antipathies is like a dream. There beyond we
enter into that life and feeling of which we can say, “It
knows us better, is stronger in us than our ordinary con-
sciousness.”

Now we notice another thing. If we really have the ex-
perience just described, if we do not merely know it in
theory but truly experience it, then of necessity at the same
time we have another experience. While we feel we can
already enter into those regions where everything is differ-
ent from what it is in ordinary consciousness, a feeling
arises in us, “I do not want to enter.” This feeling is very
deep. As a rule the curiosity that impels people to enter
the spiritual worlds is not nearly strong enough to over-
come the feeling of revulsion that says, “I will not enter.”
The aversion we feel at this particular stage arises with
tremendous force, and all sorts of misunderstandings about
it are possible.

Suppose that someone has even received personal in-
structions. He comes to his instructor and says, “I cannot

43

get on at all, your instructions are of no use.” Indeed he
may honestly think so. If the instructor gives him the an-
swer due him, however, he would not be able to understand
it at all. This answer is, “You can enter perfectly well but
you do not want to.” The pupil honestly believes he has
the will to enter because his reluctance remains hidden in
his subconsciousness. Indeed, the moment he begins to
realize his reluctance he lessens it. The idea that he does
not want to enter horrifies him so, he immediately begins
to damp down his unwillingness.

This reluctance is a subtle and insidious thing. We feel
that we cannot enter with the ego, the self, that we have
acquired in this world. If a person wants to evolve to
higher things he feels very strongly that he must leave this
self behind . That, however, is a difficult thing to do
because man would never have developed this self if he did
not feel in his daily consciousness that he has it in order to
develop it here. His ordinary ego has come into this world
in order to evolve. Thus, when man wants to enter the real
world he feels he must leave behind what he has been able
to evolve in the ordinary world. Then there is only one
way. He must have developed this self more strongly than
he needs for his ordinary consciousness. As a rule he only
develops it as far as he needs it in his ordinary life.

Now if you observe the second point in Knowledge of
the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment , you will find it
amounts to this, that the self must be made stronger than
is necessary for the purposes of daily life. Only then are
we able to go out of our body at night and still retain some-
thing that we have not used up. It is only when we have
fortified our ordinary self by our exercises, and have an
excess of self-reliance in us that we no longer want to shrink
back from the higher worlds. But then a new and con-

44

siderable danger arises. We no longer perhaps bring the
recollections of ordinary life into our dreams but we bring
something else — our expanded and strengthened self-con-
sciousness. It is as though we filled that realm with it.

Anyone who carries through such exercises as given in
my book and thus comes to have experiences like the inner
soul experiences of Arjuna, enters the realm of dream-life
with an expanded, strengthened self. The result is the same
whether done by special training or whether we were des-
tined to expand it at a definite period in our life. Arjuna is
in this position. He stands at the boundary between the
everyday world and that of dreams. He lives his way into
that higher region because through his destiny he has a
more powerful self in that realm than he needs in his ordi-
nary life. This point I shall have to elaborate still further,
showing why Arjuna has this more powerful consciousness,
because now, as soon as he penetrates into that realm,
Krishna at once receives him. Krishna lifts him out of the
self he has acquired in ordinary life, and thus he becomes
a different man from what he would have been if with his
expanded self he had not met Krishna. In that case he
would certainly have said to himself, “Blood relations are
fighting against one another, events are taking place that
must ruin the ancient holy caste-distinctions and the serv-
ice to our ancestors — events that must corrupt our woman-
kind, and conditions that will prevent us from kindling
the fires of sacrifice to our forefathers.” All these things
were part of Arjuna’s everyday consciousness. By his des-
tiny he was torn out of it. He must stand on ground where
he has to break with all these accustomed feelings con-
nected with old traditions. Thus he would have to say to
himself, “Away with all I hold sacred; with all the tradi-
tions that have been handed down to me. I will hurl myself

45

into the battle.” But that is not what happens. Krishna
appears, and utters what must appear to Arjuna as the
most extreme unscrupulousness, as egoism driven beyond
all bounds. The excess of force that Arjuna would other-
wise have experienced, that he would have used to live
through his own life, Krishna uses as a power whereby
he makes himself visible to Arjuna. To make this thought
still more clear we may say that if Arjuna had simply met
Krishna, even though the latter had actually come to him,
he would have known nothing of him, just as we would
know nothing of the sense-world if we had not received
something from the sense-world itself that formed our
senses for perceiving it. Similarly, Krishna must take from
Arjuna his expanded and strengthened consciousness. He
must in a sense tear his self out of him, and then by its
help make himself visible to Arjuna. He makes a mirror,
we can say, of what he has torn from Arjuna, so that he
may be able to appear to him.

We have sought out what in Arj una’s consciousness en-
abled Krishna to meet him. There still remains unex-
plained how Arjuna came to it at all. Nowhere do we see
the statement that Arjuna had done occult exercises. In
fact he had not done any. How then is he able to meet
Krishna? What was it that gave Arjuna a higher and
stronger self-consciousness? We shall start from this ques-
tion in the next lecture.

46

IV

E HAVE seen that if man would enter into the realm
to which, among other things, the woven fabric of our
dreams belongs, he must take with him from the ordinary
world something we designated as an intensified self-con-
sciousness. There must be a stronger and fuller life in his
ego than he needs for his purposes on the physical plane.
In our age this excess of self-consciousness is drawn forth
from our soul by the experiences we gain through occult
exercises such as I have given. Thus the first step consists
in strengthening and intensifying one’s inner self.

Man instinctively feels that he needs this strengthening,
and for this very reason a kind of fear and shyness comes
over him if he has not yet attained it. He tends to shrink
from the prospect of developing into higher worlds. We
must continually bear in mind that in the course of evolu-
tion the soul of man has passed through many different
stages. Thus, in the period of the Bhagavad Gita it was
not yet possible for a human soul to intensify its self-con-
sciousness by such occult exercises as may be practiced
today. In that ancient time, however, something else was
still present in the self; I mean, primeval clairvoyance.
This is also a faculty man does not really need for his ordi-
nary life on the physical plane, if he can be content with

47

what his epoch offers him. But the men of that ancient
time still had the remnants of primeval clairvoyance.

So, we can look far back and put ourselves in the place
of a person living at the time when the Bhagavad Gita
originated. If such a man were to express his experience
he would say, “When I look out into the world around me
I receive impressions through my senses. These impres-
sions can be combined by the intellect, whose organ the
brain is. Apart from that I still have another faculty, a
clairvoyant power that enables me to acquire knowledge of
other worlds. This power tells me that man belongs to
other realms, that my human nature extends far beyond the
ordinary physical world.” This very power, by means of
which there arises in the soul the instinctive knowledge
that it belongs not only to the physical world — this power
is actually a stronger kind of self-consciousness. It is as
though these last remnants of ancient clairvoyance still
had the power to surcharge the soul with selfhood. Today
man can again develop in himself such surplus forces if he
will go through the right occult exercises.

Now, a certain objection might be made. You know that
in anthroposophical lectures we must always forestall ob-
jections that the true occultist is well aware of. It might be
asked, “Why should it occur to present-day man to want
to undertake occult exercises at all? Why isn’t he content
with what his ordinary intellect offers him?” That, my
friends, is a big question because we touch something here
that is not only a question but an actual fact for every
thoughtful soul in the present cycle of evolution. If man
did not reach out to anything more than what his senses
and his brain-bound intellect can show him, he would cer-
tainly be content with his existence. He would observe
the things and events around him, their relationships, and

48

how they come into being and pass away again, but he
would ask no questions about this ebb and flow of activity.
He would be content with it as an animal may be content
with its existence. In fact, if man were really the being
that materialistic thinking considers him, he could quite
well accept his life as such and ask no questions. This is
the life of the animal, being content with all that arises and
passes before its senses. Why isn’t this the case with man?

Remember that we are speaking of present-day man,
for even in ancient Greece the human soul was different
in this respect from what it is today. When we today give
ourselves with our whole soul to the study of natural sci-
ence, or when we consider all the events of historical evolu-
tion and gain knowledge of the external science of history
— with all this something else finds its way almost imper-
ceptibly into our soul, something that has no purpose nor
sense for physical life. Many comparisons have been made
to illustrate this fact. I would like to mention one of them
because people often make use of it without considering
its deeper significance. A famous medical authority in the
last third of the 19th century, wishing to enhance the honor
of pure science, once drew attention to a Greek philosopher
Pythagoras who was asked, “What do you think of the
philosophers who spend their time speculating on the mean-
ing and purpose of life? How does their occupation com-
pare with the activities of ordinary men who pursue some
useful calling and play a useful part in community life?”
The philosopher replied, “Look at a fair or market; men
come to buy and sell and everyone is busy, but there are a
few among them who do not want to buy or sell but simply
want to stroll about and watch what is going on.” The phi-
losopher implied that the market represented life, people
busy in all sorts of ways; but the philosophers are not busy

49

with such affairs, instead they look at what is happening
and try to learn all about it.

Somehow a great respect for the philosophers who do not
seem to take part in any productive activity has penetrated
deeply into the minds of the so-called intellectuals among
mankind. The philosophers are honored just because their
science is independent, detached, self-sufficient. Yet this
comparison ought to give us food for thought, for it is by
no means so banal as it might appear at first sight. After
all, it is curious that philosophers should be compared to
idlers in the market-place of life, useless folk while their
fellows labor. One might indeed think of it in this way,
but we must realize that judgments are passed that origi-
nally are quite correct but become altogether wrong if they
linger on for centuries, or as in this case for thousands of
years. Therefore we ask again if these people who stroll
about in life are really to be judged as idlers. That depends
upon the standards by which we value human life. Cer-
tainly there are those who regard the philosophers as use-
less loiterers and think they would do better to carry
through some productive work. From their point of view
they may be quite right, but when man today observes life
through the senses and considers it by means of the brain-
bound intellect, something steals into his soul that obvi-
ously has no connection with the outer world of the senses.
That is the point.

This can be seen clearly in books that try to construct
a satisfactory picture of the world and life on a purely
materialistic basis. It usually turns out that the big ques-
tions do not arise until the end. These books claiming
to solve the riddle of the universe actually begin to set
forth those riddles only in their concluding pages. In effect,
when one begins today to study the external world that

is the subject treated in such books, the thought slips in
that either man exists for other worlds besides, or else
the physical world deceives us and makes fools of us be-
cause it is continually putting questions we cannot answer.

An enormous part of our soul life is meaningless if life
really ends with death; if man has no part in, no con-
nection with a higher world. Indeed, it is not the longing
for something he does not have, but the lack of sense for
what he has, that impels man to follow up these questions
and ask what it is that comes into the soul that does not
belong to this world of the senses. Thus he is driven to
cultivate something evidently without foundation in the
external world. He is impelled to take up occult exercises.
We would not say man has an inward longing for immor-
tality and therefore invents the idea of it, but rather that
the external world has implanted something in his soul
that would be meaningless, unreal, if the whole of existence
were included between birth and death. Man is impelled to
ask the very nature, not of something he does not have, but
of something he has.

In fact, present-day man is no longer quite in the position
of a mere loiterer or on-looker, so he cannot appeal now to
the Greek philosopher. In those times the comparison held
good, but today it does not. Today we might say that buyers
and sellers come and go. When at length they close the
market and make up accounts they find something that cer-
tainly could neither have been bought nor sold, nor can they
find out whence it came. That never happens in an ordinary
market, but so it is in the market of life. (Every comparison
has its flaw and this one is all the better for it.) As we go on
living we are continually finding things that life opens to
view, yet no explanation for them is to be found in the world
of sense. That is the deeper reason why there are people in

5i

the world today who despair of life yet at the same time have
vague, unrecognized longings. Something is active in them
that does not belong to the physical world but keeps on put-
ting forth questions about other worlds. For this reason we
now have to acquire a spiritual culture. Otherwise we shall
be overcome by hopelessness and despair.

What today we have to acquire, a man like Arjuna had,
simply because he lived in the ancient age of primeval
clairvoyance. Yet it also was a period of transition, be-
cause he belonged to that time in evolution when only the
last remnants and echoes of that clairvoyance remained.
If we are to understand the Bhagavad Gita it is important
to realize that at the time of its origin men were entering
an age in which this old clairvoyance gradually became
lost. In this lies the deep undercurrent of that sublime
poem; or we may say, the source of the breath poured out
through it. For this song resounds with tones of a great
turning-point in time, when, from the twilight of the old
clairvoyance, a night was to begin in which a new force
could be born to mankind. Only in that night could a
force be born that the soul of today possesses, but that
souls of that time did not yet possess. About Arjuna then
we can say that ancient clairvoyance is still present in his
soul but it is flickering out. It is no longer a strong, spon-
taneous force but requires such a harrowing experience as
I have described to re-awaken it. What then can Arjuna
perceive through this awakening of the ancient power of
vision, which at other times was dying away within him?
He sees the Spiritual Being who is called Krishna.

Here it is necessary to point out that though man may
lift his soul today into that realm where his dreams are
woven, this is no longer enough to give him a full under-
standing of Krishna’s being. Even if we develop the forces

52

enabling us to consciously pass into the region of dream-
consciousness, we still are not able today to fully discover
what Krishna is. Referring again to what was said yester-
day, let us call our everyday consciousness the lowest realm.
About it lies a realm we are unconscious of in daily
life, or rather that reaches us in a kind of phantom picture
veiled in our dreams. When we push these aside impres-
sions from another world enter. Into all the experiences
man has of his physical environment something now enters
that is like a kind of overflow in his soul and belongs really
to other worlds, to inner supersensible worlds. Now he has
an experience that cannot be described as a reminiscence
of ordinary life, because the world now has a different as-
pect from anything known on the physical plane. We dis-
cover that we are seeing something we do not see in the
ordinary world. Though we often imagine that we see light,
in reality it is not so. On the physical plane we never see
light, only color and different shades of color, darker and
lighter colors. We see the effects of light but light itself
speeds invisibly through space. We can easily convince
ourselves of this fact. When a ray of light strikes through
the window we see a kind of streak of light-rays in the
room, caused by dust in the air. We see reflections of
light from the glittering particles of dust, the light itself
remaining invisible.

After lifting his experience to the higher realm we have
spoken of, man really does begin to see the light itself.
There he is surrounded by flowing light, just as in the phys-
ical world he lives in flowing air. Only he does not enter
this world with his physical body. He has no need to
breathe there. Man enters that world with the part of his
being that needs the light as in the physical world his body
needs the air. In this region light is the element of life —

53

light-air we might call it — and it is a necessity for exist-
ence.

Further, that light is permeated and transfused with
something not unlike the cloud-forms shaping and re-shap-
ing in our atmosphere. The clouds are water, but up there
what meets us like do ing forms is nothing else than the
weaving life of sound, the music of the spheres. Still fur-
ther we shall perceive the flowing of life itself. Thus we
may begin to describe the world into which our soul enters,
but the terms of our description must remain meaningless
for the physical world. Perhaps he who uses words most
lacking in meaning for the physical world will best de-
scribe that other world that has a far higher reality.

Of course our materialistically-minded friends will find
it easy to refute us. Their arguments against what the oc-
cultist has to say are plausible enough. The occultist him-
self knows how easily such objections are made, for the
very reason that the higher worlds are best described by
words not suitable for things of the physical plane. For
example he would speak of light-air, or air-light. On the
physical plane there is no such thing, but over there, there
is. Indeed, when we penetrate into that realm we also
discover what it is to be deprived of this life element, to
have insufficient light-air. We feel a pain of suffocation in
our soul, comparable to losing our breath for lack of air on
the physical plane. There we also find the opposite condi-
tion, a fullness of pure, holy light-air when we live in it
and when we perceive spiritual beings who manifest them-
selves in full clearness in this element of airy light and
have their life in it. Those are the beings who stand under
the guidance of Lucifer. The moment we enter that realm
without sufficient preparation, without proper training,

54

Lucifer gains the power to deprive us of the light-air we
need. We can say, he suffocates our souls.

It is not quite the same effect as suffocation on the phys-
ical plane. But like a polar bear transported to the South,
we thirst and long for something that can reach us from
the spiritual treasure, the spiritual light of the physical
plane. That is just what Lucifer desires, for then we do
not pay attention to all that comes from the higher hier-
archies but thirstily cleave to all that Lucifer has brought
onto the physical plane. This is what happens if we have
not sufficiently trained ourselves in preparation. Then
when we stand before Lucifer he takes away the light-air
from us. We crave breath, and long for the spiritual that
comes from the physical plane.

Let us suppose that someone goes through a training that
brings him far enough to enter the higher worlds, to reach
this upper region. But suppose he has not done all that be-
longs to the training; suppose he has forgotten that with
all his exercises he must at the same time be ennobling his
moral sense, his moral feelings, that he must tear all earthly
ambitions and lust for power from his soul. Indeed a man
can reach the higher worlds even though he be vain and
ambitious, but then he takes these qualities with him.
When a person has not purified his moral feelings Lucifer
takes the light-air away from him, so that he perceives
nothing of what is really there, and instead he longs for the
things on the physical plane. He breathes in, so to say,
what he has been able to perceive on the physical plane.
So he may imagine that he perceives something only to be
seen spiritually in the light-air. He imagines that he sees
the different incarnations of various human beings. But
it is not so. He does not see them because he lacks the air-

55

light. Instead, like a thirsty being, he sucks up into that
realm things of the physical plane below, and describes all
manner of things acquired there as though they were proc-
esses in the higher region. Actually there is no more harm-
ful way of raising one’s soul into the higher worlds than by
means of vain and earthly love of power! If one does this,
one will never be able to bring down true results of knowl-
edge. What one brings will be a mere reflection, a phantom
picture of the speculations and conjectures one may have
made in the physical world.

Here we have been describing what may be called the gen-
eral scenery of that realm. There are also Beings we meet
there, whom we may call Elemental Beings. In the physi-
cal world we often speak of the forces of nature. In that
higher realm these same forces manifest themselves as real
beings. There we make a definite discovery. Through the
actual facts that meet us we discover that whereas on the
physical plane good and evil exist together, in that higher
realm there are separate, specific forces of good and evil.
Here in the physical world good and evil are combined and
interwoven in each human soul. One has more of a tend-
ency to good, another less. In that realm there are evil
beings who exist to battle against the work of good beings.
On entering that realm, therefore, we already have occa-
sion to make use of the strengthened self-consciousness we
mentioned yesterday. We have need of the more acute
power of judgment that must come with our enhanced self.
Then we may really be in a position to say that here in the
higher realm there must needs be beings who have the mis-
sion of evil. Such beings have to exist alongside those who
have the mission of good.

We often hear it asked, “Why didn’t the all-wise God of
the universe simply create the good alone? Why isn’t it

56

everywhere, always?” Now we gain this conviction, how-
ever, that if only the good were present the world would
become one-sided, it would not bring forth all the fullness
of life that it does yield. The good must have something
to oppose it. This, in fact, can already be realized on the
physical plane, but in that higher realm we perceive it with
far greater force. There we see that only people who are
content with a merely sentimental and dreamy outlook
can imagine that good beings alone could bring about the
purposes of the universe. In the realm of everyday life
we might do with sentimentality, but we cannot tolerate it
when we enter the stern realities of the supersensible world.
There we know that the good beings alone could not have
made the world. They would be too weak to mold this
universe. In the totality of evolution those forces must be
included which come from the evil beings. There is great
wisdom in this fact that evil is mingled in cosmic evolution.
Thus, one of the things we have to get rid of when we enter
spiritual life is sentimentality. Bravely and unflinchingly
we must approach the dangerous truths that dawn upon us
when we perceive the battle that is fought in just this realm
— the battle between the good and evil beings that can there
be revealed to us. All these are experiences we have when
we have trained and adapted our souls to entering con-
sciously into this realm.

So far we have only entered the realm of dreams. We
human beings live in still another realm, one for which we
are so little adapted in ordinary life that we generally have
no perceptions whatever in it. It is the realm through
which we live in dreamless sleep. Here already an absolute
paradox appears, for sleep after all is characterized by the
complete cessation of consciousness. In normal human
life today man ceases to be conscious when he falls to

57

sleep, and he does not regain consciousness till he wakes
up again. In the age of primeval clairvoyance this realm
too was something the soul could experience. If we go back
into those ancient periods of evolution there was actually
a condition of life corresponding to our sleep in which, how-
ever, man could perceive in a still higher, still more spirit-
ual world than the world of dreams. This was true even in
early post-Atlantean times. There we find conditions that,
in regard to the usual human processes, are exactly like
the condition of sleep, but are not, because they are per-
meated by consciousness. When we have reached this
height we do not see the physical world, even though we
still see the world of light-air, of sound, of cosmic harmony,
and of the battle between the good and evil beings. The
world we see may be said to be still more fundamentally
different from all that exists in the physical world. So it is
yet more difficult to describe than the world we find on
entering the region of dream consciousness. I would like
now to give you an idea of how one’s consciousness in this
realm works, and of its actual effects.

Anyone who describes that sublime world into which our
dreams find their way, and about which I have given the
merest hint, will be labelled a fantastic visionary by the
bigoted intellectualism of today. If anyone begins to speak
of that still higher realm through which man ordinarily
sleeps, then people, if they take any notice at all, do not
stop at abusing him as a visionary. They altogether lose
their heads. We have already had an example of this.
When my books were first published in Germany, the crit-
ics, who are supposed to represent the intellectual culture
of today, attacked them with all sorts of insinuations. In
one point, however, their criticism ran absolutely wild; in
fact, they became foolish in their fury. I mean the point

where I had to call attention to something that could only
originate in the spiritual realm we are now considering.
This was the question of the two Jesus children mentioned
in my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind.

For those of our friends who have not heard of this I may
say once more that it appeared as a result of occult re-
search, namely, that at the beginning of our era not only
one but two Jesus children were born. One was descended
from the so-called Nathan line of the House of David, the
other from the Solomon line. These two children grew up
side by side. In the body of the Solomon child lived the
soul of Zarathustra. In the twelfth year of the child’s life
this soul passed over into the other Jesus child and lived in
that body until its thirtieth year. Here we have a matter
of the deepest significance. Zarathustra’s soul went on liv-
ing in the body that until its twelfth year had been occu-
pied by a mysterious soul. And then, only from the thir-
tieth year onward, there lived in this body the Being Whom
we call the Christ, Who remained on earth altogether for
three years.

We really cannot take amiss the reaction of the critics to
this statement, as it is natural that they should want to
have something to say about the matter from their scholarly
viewpoint. But what they set out to criticize comes from a
realm in which they are always fast asleep 1 So we cannot
expect them to know anything about it. Yet a healthy hu-
man understanding is able to grasp this fact. People only
will not give themselves a chance to understand. In their
haste they change their power of understanding into bitter-
ness and fury.

Such truths as that about the two Jesus children, which
are to be found in this higher realm, never have anything
to do with sympathy and antipathy. We find such truths;

59

we never experience them in the way we gain experience
in the usual manner of knowledge in the physical world,
or even in the realm of dream life. In both these areas we
are there, so to say. We are present at the origin of our
knowing or perception. This is true also of those occultists
who are conscious only as far as the realm of dreams. We
can say that a person witnesses the birth of his knowledge,
of his perceptions, in that realm, but truths like this con-
cerning the two Jesus children can never be found in this
way. When truths come to us in that higher realm and
enter our consciousness, the moment in which we actually
acquired them has long since passed. We experienced them
long before we met them with our full consciousness, as
we have to do in our time. We have them already in us.
So that when we reach these truths — the most important,
the most living and essential of all truths — we distinctly
have the feeling that when we gained them we were in an
earlier time than the present; that we are now drawing out
of the depths of our soul what we acquired in an earlier
time and are bringing it into our consciousness. Such
truths we discover in ourselves, just as in the outer world
we come across a flower or any other object. Even as in
the outer world we can think about an object that is simply
there before us, so can we think about these truths when
we have discovered them in ourselves, in our own self.

In the outer world we can only judge an object after we
have perceived it. In the same way we find those sublime
truths objectively in ourselves, and only then do we study
them, in ourselves. We inwardly investigate them as we
investigate the external facts of nature. Just as it would
have no meaning to ask of a flower whether it is true or
false, there would be no sense in asking about these truths
that we simply come upon in ourselves, whether they are

60

true or false. Truth and falsehood only come into the pic-
ture when it is a question of our power to describe what
we find or what arises in our consciousness. Descriptions
can be true or false. Truth and falsehood do not concern
the facts, they concern the manner in which any thinking
being approaches or deals with those facts. Thus, when we
do research and get results in this realm we are really look-
ing into a region of the soul we have lived in before but did
not look into with our consciousness.

In carrying on our occult exercises we are best able to
enter this realm if we pay positive attention to those mo-
ments when from the depths of our soul not mere judg-
ments arise, but facts; facts that we know we did not con-
sciously take part in originating. The more we are able
to wonder at the things there unveiled, like the objective
things of the outer world, the more astonishing it all is for
us, the better are we prepared to enter into this realm. So,
as a general rule, we do not make a good entrance if we
have all sorts of conjectures and constructions in our minds.
For example, there is no better way of finding nothing at
all about the previous incarnations of some person than to
speculate as to who they may have been earlier. Let us say
you wanted to investigate the earlier incarnations of Robes-
pierre. The best way of finding out nothing at all about
him would be to search about for historical personalities
you think might possibly have been his previous incarna-
tions. In that way you never can discover the truth. You
must get out of the habit of making conjectures and theo-
ries and forming opinions.

He would become a true occultist who would set himself
to making as few judgments as possible about the world
because then he will most quickly attain the condition in
which the facts can meet him. The more a man cultivates

61

silence in his conjectures and opinions, the more will his
soul be filled with the actual truths of the spiritual world.
Someone, for example, who had grown up with a particu-
lar religious bias, with definite feelings and ideas or per-
haps views about the Christ — such a person in general
would not be the most adapted to discover a truth like the
history of the two Jesus children. Just when one feels a
little neutral about the Christ event one is well prepared
for such a discovery, provided of course he has made all
the other necessary preparations. People with a Buddhis-
tic bias will least easily be able to talk sense about Buddha,
just as those with a Christian bias will least easily be able
to talk sense about Christ. This is always true.

If we would enter into the third realm just described, it
is necessary that we go through all the bitterness — for in
ordinary life we cannot help feeling it in this way — of be-
coming, so to say, a twofold person. We are, in fact, two-
fold beings in ordinary life, even if we make no conscious
use of the one-half of our existence, for we are both waking
and sleeping beings. Different as these two conditions are,
so is that third realm in the higher worlds different from
this physical world. That realm has a peculiar existence
of its own. There also we are surrounded by a world, but
one so altogether new and different that we get to know it
best if we extinguish not only the sense impressions of this
world of ours but even our feelings and sentiments and all
the things that have the power to arouse our passions and
enthusiasms. In ordinary life man is so little fitted for
conscious experience of that higher world that his con-
sciousness is extinguished every night. He can only attain
experience there if he is able to become a twofold man.
Those who have the power at will to forget and to blot out
all their interests in this physical world, are then able to

62

enter that higher realm. The world between — that is to
say, where our dreams are woven — is made of the materials
of both worlds, it is penetrated by reflections of the higher
worlds of which man is generally not aware, and by remi-
niscences of ordinary consciousness. That is why no one
can perceive the true causes of events in the physical world
who is not able to penetrate with understanding into that
third realm.

Now if a man of today wishes to discover through his
own experience who Krishna is, he can only make that dis-
covery in the third realm. Arjuna’s impressions, which in
the sublime Gita are described to us through the words of
Krishna, have their origin in that world. For this reason I
have had to prepare the way today by speaking of man’s
ascent into the third realm. Only so will you be able to
understand the origin of the strange and wondrous truths
that Krishna speaks to Arjuna — truths that sound so alto-
gether different from anything that is spoken in ordinary
life.

These lectures are to help us gain knowledge of Krishna ;
that is to say, of the very essence of the Bhagavad Gita.
Also, the occult principles of this wonderful Song are to
give you something which, if you really make use of it, can
enable you to find the way into the higher worlds because
the way is open to every man. We have only to realize
that the grain of gold with which we must begin is ours
once we are aware of how many things there are in which
the highest spiritual beings live and work and are inter-
woven in our everyday life.

63

V

If WE WOULD penetrate into the mysteries of human
life we must fix our attention on a great law of existence,
I mean what is called the cyclic law. As a rule it is better
to explain and describe than to define. In this case also I
prefer to explain by definite concepts what is meant by the
cyclic course of life, for alongside the actual reality a defini-
tion must always appear scanty and lacking in substance.
A philosophic school in Greece, wishing to gain insight into
the nature of definitions, once set out to give a definition
of man. As you know, definitions are intended to provide
concepts corresponding to the phenomena of experience,
but those having logical insight cannot help feeling the
poverty and unfruitfulness of this process. The members
of the Greek school eventually agreed to define man as a
featherless biped. While this particular definition sounds
rather like a silly epigram it does represent the nature of
man in certain respects. The next day one of the members
of this school brought in a plucked hen and said to the
company, “According to your definition this is a man.” A
silly way to show the unreality of attempts to define things.
Being concerned with realities we will proceed then to de-
scribe things in their essential characteristics.

To begin, we will consider a cycle familiar in everyday

64

life, that of our waking and sleeping. What does it really
signify? We can only understand the nature of sleep if we
realize that in the present epoch the soul activity of man’s
waking life brings about a continual destruction of delicate
structures in the nervous system. With our every thought
and with every impulse of will that arises in us under the
stimulus of the outside world, we are destroying delicate
forms in our brain. In the near future it will more and
more be realized how sleep has to supplement our waking
day life. We are approaching the point where natural sci-
ence will join with spiritual science in these matters. Natu-
ral science has already produced more than one theory to
the effect that our waking life brings a kind of destructive
process to nerves and brain. Owing to this fact we have
to allow the corresponding reverse process, the compensa-
tion, to take place during sleep.

While we are asleep forces are at work in us that do not
otherwise manifest themselves, of which we remain un-
conscious. They are busy reconstructing the finer nerve
structures of our brain. Now it is this very destruction that
enables us to have processes of thought, and to acquire
knowledge. Ordinary knowledge would not be possible if
processes of disintegration did not take place in us during
our waking hours. Thus, two opposite processes are at
work in our nervous system — while we are awake a process
of destruction, during sleep a repairing process. Since it
is to the destructive process that we owe our consciousness,
it is that process we perceive. Our waking life consists in
perceiving disintegrating processes. During sleep we are
not conscious because no destructive process is at work in
us. The force, which at other times creates our conscious-
ness, is in sleep used up in constructive work. There you
have a cycle.

65

Let us now consider what happens during sleep. Because
of this alternating cycle of build-up and break-down proc-
esses we see why it is so dangerous to health to go without
proper sleep. Certainly man’s life is so arranged that the
danger is not immediately apparent, because what is pres-
ent in him at any one time has been built up in him for a
considerable time before. Thus, the abnormal processes
cannot affect his nature as deeply as we might imagine.
We could expect people who suffer from sleeplessness to
go to pieces quickly, but they do not collapse nearly so
quickly. The reason for this is the same as that which
holds for people both blind and deaf, like the famous Helen
Keller, whose intellect can nevertheless be developed. In
the present age this should theoretically be impossible, for
what constitutes the greater part of our intelligence enters
the brain through eyes and ears. The reason for Miss Kel-
ler’s intellectual development is that, though the portals
of her senses are closed, she has inherited a brain that has
the potentiality for development. If man were not an he-
reditary being such a case as hers would not be possible.
Which is to say, if man did not have a much healthier brain
through heredity than we generally give him credit for,
sleeplessness would in a very short time completely under-
mine his health. But people mostly have so much inher-
ited strength that insomnia can persist for a long time with-
out seriously injuring them. It remains true, however, that
the cycle of construction with its resulting unconsciousness
in sleep, and destruction with its consciousness in waking
life, fundamentally takes place.

In the totality of human life we perceive not only these
smaller cycles but larger ones as well. Here I will call your
attention to a cycle I have often mentioned before. Anyone
who follows the course of life in the Western world will

66

observe a quite definite configuration of the spiritual life
of mankind in the period from the fourteenth, fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries to the last third of the nineteenth. In
ordinary life these developments are observed much too
vaguely and inaccurately, but if we look into them deeply
enough we shall see how, in all directions since the last
third of the nineteenth century, there have been signs of
an altogether different form of Western spiritual life. Of
course, we are at the beginning of this new trend so people
do not notice it in its full significance. Just imagine some-
one trying to speak before such an audience as this, say for
instance in the 40’s or 50’s of the nineteenth century, about
the same things I am putting before you here. It is quite
unthinkable. It would be absurd. It would have been out
of the question to speak of these things as we do now, at
any time from the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies to the last third of the nineteenth. This was the pe-
riod when the natural scientific mode of thought, the way
of thinking that produced the great materialistic achieve-
ments, reached its height. The stragglers of scientific in-
tellectualism will go on adhering to it for some time to
come, but the actual epoch of materialism is past.

Just as the era of scientific thought began about the fif-
teenth century, so the era of spiritual thought is now be-
ginning. These two sharply differentiated epochs meet in
the very time in which we are living. It will more and more
become evident how the new mode of thought has to come
in touch with the reality of things. Thought will become
very different from the thought of the last four centuries,
though the latter had to be so in its time. During this pe-
riod man’s gaze had to be directed outward into the far
spaces of the universe. I have often spoken of the great
significance for Western spiritual evolution of that mo-

67

ment when Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Giordano
Bruno together burst open the blue vault of heaven. Until
their time it was believed that the blue cup of the heavens
was suspended over our earth. These great thinkers de-
clared that this hollow cup did not really exist. They
taught mankind to look out into the infinite distances of
cosmic space.

Now what was it that was so significant about Bruno’s
deed in explaining to men how the blue sphere they had set
as the boundary of their power of sight was not really there;
when he said, “You have only to realize that it is you your-
selves who project it out into space”? The important point
was that it marked the beginning of an epoch, which came to
an end with the discovery that by means of the spectro-
scope one could investigate the material composition of
the farthest heavenly bodies. A marvellous epoch, this
epoch of materialism! Now we are at the starting point of
another epoch, one that has its origin in the same laws of
growth as the preceding one but that nevertheless is to be the
epoch of spirituality. Just as the epoch of natural science was
prepared by Bruno’s work in breaking through the limits of
space, so will the firmament of time be broken through in
the age now beginning. Mankind, imagining life to be en-
closed between birth and death, or conception and death,
will learn that these are only boundaries set by the human
soul itself. Just as in earlier times men had themselves set
as the boundary of their senses a blue sphere above them,
and then of a sudden their vision expanded into the infinite
spheres of space, so will the boundaries of time be broken
through, those of birth and death. Set free of these there
will lie before man’s gaze in the infinite sea of time all the
changes in the kernel of man’s being as he follows it through

68

its repeated incarnations. Thus a new age is beginning, the
age of spiritual thought.

Now if we can recognize the occult basis of these tran-
sitions from one age to another, where shall we see the cause
of this change in human thought? It is not anything that
philosophy or external physiology or anatomy can find of
their own accord. Yet it is true that forces that have entered
the active souls of men and are being used today to gather
spiritual knowledge — these same forces, during the last
four centuries, have been working at man’s organism
as constructive forces. Throughout the period from Coper-
nicus to the last third of the nineteenth century mysterious
forces were at work in man’s bodily organism just as con-
structive forces work in his nervous system during sleep.
These forces were building up a definite structure in certain
parts of the brain. The brains of Western people are differ-
ent from what they were five centuries ago. What is under
man’s skull today does not have the same appearance as it
had then, for a delicate organ has been formed which was
not there before. Even though this cannot be proved exter-
nally, it is true. Under the human forehead a delicate or-
gan has developed, and the forces building it have now ful-
filled their task. In the coming cycle of history we are now
approaching it will become evident in more and more peo-
ple. Now that it is there, the forces that built it are liber-
ated. With these very forces Western humanity will be
gaining spiritual knowledge. Here we have the occult physi-
ological foundation of the matter. Already we are begin-
ning to work with these forces that men could not use dur-
ing the last four hundred years because they were spent in
building up the organ needed to allow spiritual knowledge
to take its place in the world.

69

Let us imagine a man of the seventeenth or eighteenth
century. As he stands there before us we know that certain
occult forces are at work behind his forehead, transforming
his brain. These forces were perpetually at work in all the
people of the West. Now let us assume that this man had
managed to suspend these forces for a moment, made them
cease their work. The same thing would have happened to
him — and it did happen in certain cases — as takes place
when in the middle of his sleep a man suspends the forces
that ordinarily work at building up the nerve structures of
the brain; he lets them run loose. It is possible to experi-
ence moments when we seem to waken in sleep, and yet do
not waken, for we remain motionless, we cannot move our
limbs, we have no external perception. But we are awake.
In the moments of free play of those regenerating forces
we can use them for clairvoyant vision; we can see into the
spiritual worlds. A similar thing happened if a man two
hundred years ago suspended the constructive activity on
his brain. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century he
saw what was working into his brain from the spiritual
worlds, so that from the twentieth century onward men
might raise themselves to spiritual vision.

There were always isolated persons who had such experi-
ences; experiences of truly catastrophic force, indescrib-
ably impressive. There were always people who for mo-
ments lived in what was working in from the supersensible
to bring forth in the sense world what did not exist in for-
mer cycles of evolution, the finer organ in the frontal cav-
ity. Such men saw the Gods ; spiritual beings at work in the
building process of the human organism. In this we see
clairvoyance described from a fresh aspect. We can bring
about such moments during sleep by practicing the exer-
cises I have given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher

70

Worlds and Its Attainment, and thereby gain glimpses of
spiritual life such as are described in my book, A Road to
Self-knowledge. Thus it is possible during a given cycle of
evolution for the forces at work preparing the future to
become free for a moment and become clairvoyantly visi-
ble.

We may give a name to these forces — for what are names?
We can call them the forces of Gabriel. But the point is to
gain a moment’s insight into the supersensible where we
perceive a spiritual Being working from those worlds into
the human organism. A sum of forces, in fact, directed by a
Being, Gabriel, of the hierarchy of the Archangels. From
the fifteenth to the last third of the nineteenth century the
Gabriel force was at work on man’s organism, and because
of this the power to understand the spiritual slept for awhile.
It was this sleep of spiritual understanding that brought
forth the great triumphs of natural science. Now this force
is awakened. The spiritual has done its work; the Gabriel
forces have been liberated. We can now use them, for they
have become forces of the soul. Here we have a cycle of
somewhat greater significance than that of waking and
sleeping.

There are, however, even mightier cycles in human evo-
lution. We may note how self-consciousness, the pride of
mankind in this era of our post-Atlantean age, was not al-
ways there but had to be developed gradually. Today the
word evolution is often heard, but people seldom take it in
real earnest. We can sometimes have strange experiences of
people’s naivete in regard to what surrounds them, so sim-
ply do they allow many things to play up from their sub-
consciousness into their conscious life and do not easily
reach the point of attributing a supersensible origin to what
enters their known world from the unknown. In the last

7i

few days I have again come across a curious instance of
the logic that stops halfway. We can well understand why
the anthroposophical outlook meets with so much resist-
ance when we bear in mind that a certain special habit of
thought is needed to understand anthroposophy. I mean,
the habit of never stopping halfway along any line of think-
ing. I have here a Freethinker’s Calendar, published in Ger-
many. The first edition came out last year. In it a perfectly
sincere person attacks the custom of teaching children re-
ligious ideas. He points out that this is contrary to
the child’s nature, since he himself has observed that when
children are allowed to grow up on their own they develop
no religious ideas. Therefore it is unnatural to inculcate
these ideas into children. Now we can be certain that this
Calendar will reach hundreds of people who will imagine
that they understand how senseless it is to teach children
religion. There are many such arguments today, and peo-
ple never notice their complete lack of logic. In reply we
need only ask, “If children for some reason have lived all
their lives on an island alone and have not learned to speak,
ought we therefore to refrain from teaching them to
speak?” That would be the same kind of logic. Of course,
people will not admit it is the same since they found it so
profound in the first instance. It is curious to observe
things like this on the broad horizon of external life today;
things that represent some after-play from the materialist
age that is passing.

I have here another example, some remarkable essays re-
cently published by Woodrow Wilson, President of the
United States of America. There is one on the laws of hu-
man progress. He points out how men are influenced by the
dominant thought of their age; how in Newton’s time, when
everything was permeated with the idea of gravity, the ef-

72

fects of Newton’s theories could be felt in social concepts,
even in political terminology, though actually these theories
are only applicable to the heavenly bodies. The idea of grav-
ity was especially extended in its influence. All this is true.
We need only read the literature of Newton’s time to find
everywhere words like “attraction” and “repulsion.” Wil-
son develops this point very ingeniously. He says how
unsatisfactory it is to apply purely mechanical concepts,
as of celestial mechanism, to human life and conditions.
He shows how human life at that time was completely im-
bedded in these ideas and how widely they influenced po-
litical and social affairs, and he rightly denounces this appli-
cation of purely mechanical laws in an age when Newtonism
drew all thought under its yoke. “We must think along dif-
ferent lines,” says Wilson, and then proceeds to construct
his own concept of the state. Now he does it in such a way
that, after all he has said about Newtonism, he himself al-
lows Darwinism to speak through every page of his writ-
ing. In fact, he is naive enough to admit it. He says the
Newtonian concepts were not sufficient, we must apply the
Darwinian laws of the organism. Here we have a living in-
stance of the way people march through the world today
with half thought-out logic because in reality the laws de-
rived purely from the living organism are also insufficient.
We need laws of the soul and spirit. Thus we understand
how objections are piled up against anthroposophical
thought, for this requires an all-pervading thinking, a
logic that penetrates to the core and does not stop halfway.
This is just the virtue of the anthroposophical outlook. It
forces its devotees to think in an orderly manner.

So we must think of evolution in the spiritual sense, not
in Wilson’s Darwinistic sense. We must realize that the
self-consciousness that today is the essential characteristic

73

of mankind, this firm rooting in the ego, has only gradually
developed. This too had to be prepared, just as our spiritual
thinking was being prepared in the last four centuries.
Spiritual forces had to work down from the supersensible
worlds in order to develop what afterward found expression
in the self-conscious life of men. In this connection we
can speak of a break in evolution, with a preceding and a
succeeding epoch. We will call the latter the age of self-
consciousness.

This period is preceded in the cyclic interchange by one
in which the organ of self-consciousness was being built
into man from the supersensible worlds. What now works
as a soul force in self-consciousness was then working un-
recognizably in the depths of human nature. The junction
of these two great epochs is an important point in evolution.
Before this time most people had no self-consciousness at
all. Even in the most advanced it was comparatively weak.
People then did not think as they do today, with the aware-
ness, “I am thinking this thought.” Their thoughts rose up
like living dreams. Nor did their impulses of will and feel-
ing enter their consciousness as they do today. They lived
more of an instinctive life in their souls. From the spiritual
worlds, however, beings were working into man’s organism,
preparing it for a later time when it would be capable of self-
consciousness. Meanwhile people had to live quite differ-
ently then, even as external experience is quite different be-
tween the fifteenth and twentieth centuries A.D. from
what it will become later on. So we must say that until the
period when self-consciousness entered the human soul
everything that could prepare the way for it had been
flowing into the life of man.

Thus, for example, in the region where self-conscious-
ness was first to make its appearance, men were strictly

74

divided into castes. They respected this division. A man
born in a lower caste felt it as his highest endeavor so to or-
der his life within that caste that he might raise himself in
later incarnations into higher ones. It was a mighty driving
force in the evolution of the human soul. Men knew that by
developing their soul forces they were making themselves
fit to rise into a higher caste in their next life. So too they
looked up to their ancestors and saw in them what is not
bound to the physical body. They revered their ancestors,
feeling that although they had died their spiritual part re-
mained, working on spiritually after death. This ancestor
worship was a good preparation for the mighty goal of hu-
man nature because in it they could see what is now living
already in us — the self-conscious soul, which is not bound
to the physical body and passes through the gates of death
into the spiritual worlds.

Just as during four centuries the kind of education that
forced men to think out natural science was the best edu-
cation toward spirituality, so in that ancient time mankind
was best educated by the inspiration of great reverence for
their castes and their ancestors. Men developed a strong
liking for the system of castes. In that pious reverence they
had something that worked into their lives with great power
and deeply affected them. Spiritual beings were work-
ing into it, preparing for the future possibility for a man to
say with every thought, “/ think,” with every feeling, “I
feel,” with every impulse of will, “/ will.”

Now let us imagine that toward the end of that ancient
epoch some mighty shock or upheaval in a man’s life caused
all the forces active then to suddenly cease binding him,
suspending their action for a moment. Then he would ex-
perience what we can experience in sleep when for a mo-
ment we withdraw the constructive forces and become clair-

75

voyant. Or what men of the eighteenth century could experi-
ence by suspending the forces then at work on their brain
structure. If in that ancient time a man withdrew his un-
derstanding and feeling for the fires of sacrifice and rever-
ence for his ancestors, if he experienced such a shock, he
could for a moment use those forces to gaze into the super-
sensible worlds. He could then see how the self-conscious-
ness of man was being prepared from the spiritual world.
This is what Arjuna did when at the moment of battle he
experienced such a shock. The usually constructive forces
stood still in him, and he could look upward to the divine
being who was preparing the way for self-consciousness.
This divinity was Krishna.

Krishna then is that being who has worked through cen-
turies and centuries on the human organism, to make man
capable — from the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. on-
ward — of entering gradually the epoch of self-conscious-
ness. What kind of impression does he make, this master-
builder of the human ego-nature? He has to speak to Ar-
juna in words saturated through and through with self-con-
sciousness.

Thus from another side we understand Krishna as the di-
vine architect of what prepared and brought about self-con-
sciousness in man. The Bhagavad Gita tells us how under
special circumstances a man could come into the presence
of this divine builder of his nature. There we have one as-
pect of Krishna’s nature. In the succeeding lectures we
shall learn to know yet another aspect.

76

VI

It REALLY is exceedingly difficult in our Western civiliza-
tion to speak intelligently and intelligibly about such a
work as the Bhagavad Gita . This is so because at present
there is a dominating tendency to interpret any spiritual
work of this kind as a kind of doctrine, an abstract teach-
ing, or a philosophy, that makes it hard for people to come
to a sound judgment in such matters. They like to ap-
proach such spiritual creations from the ideal or conceptual
point of view. Here we touch upon something that makes
it most difficult in our time to gain a true judgment about
the great historical impulses in mankind’s evolution. How
often, for instance, it is pointed out that this or that saying
occurring in the Gospels as the teaching of Christ Jesus is to
be found in some earlier work no less profoundly expressed.
Then it is said, “You see, it is the same teaching after all.”
Certainly, that is not incorrect because in countless ins-
tances it can be shown that the teachings of the Gospels oc-
cur in earlier spiritual works. Yet, though such a statement
is not incorrect, it may be nonsense from the standpoint of
a truly fundamental knowledge of human evolution. Peo-
ple’s thinking will have to get accustomed to this and real-
ize that a statement can be perfectly correct and yet non-
sense. Not until this is no longer regarded as a contradiction
will it be possible to judge certain matters in a really un-
biassed way.

77

Suppose, for instance, someone says that he sees in the
Bhagavad Gita one of the greatest creations of the human
spirit, a creation that has never been surpassed in later
times. Suppose further, having said this, he adds, “Never-
theless, what entered the world with the revelation inher-
ent in the Christ Impulse, is something altogether differ-
ent, something to which the Bhagavad Gita could not attain
even if its beauty and greatness were increased a hundred
times.” These two statements do not contradict each other.
According to the habits of modern abstract thinking, how-
ever, we may have a contradiction here. Yet, in no sense is
it in truth a contradiction. Indeed one might go further, and
ask, “When was that mightiest word spoken that may be re-
garded as giving the impulse to the human ego, so that it
may take its place in the evolution of man?” That signifi-
cant word was uttered at the moment Krishna spoke to Ar-
juna; when he poured into Arjuna’s ears the most powerful,
incisive, burning words to quicken the consciousness of self
in man. In the whole range of the world’s life there is noth-
ing to be found that kindled the self of man more mightily
than the living force of Krishna’s words to Arjuna. Of
course, we must not take those words in the way words are
so often taken in Western countries where the noblest
words are given merely an abstract, philosophic interpreta-
tion. In any such we would certainly miss the essence of
the Bhagavad Gita. In this way Western scholars today
have so outrageously misused and tortured the Bhagavad
Gita. They have even gone so far as to dispute whether it
is more representative of the Sankhya philosophy or of
some other school of thought. In fact, a distinguished
scholar, in his edition of this poem, has actually printed cer-
tain lines in small type because in his view they ought to be

78

expunged altogether, having crept in by mistake. He thinks
nothing is really a part of the Gita except what accords with
the Sankhya, or at the most with the Yoga philosophy.

It may be said though that no trace is to be found in this
great poem of philosophy as we speak of it today. At
most one could say that in ancient India certain basic dis-
positions of soul developed into certain philosophic tenden-
cies. These really have nothing to do with the Bhagavad
Gita, at least not in the sense of being an interpretation or
exposition of it. It is altogether unfair to the intellectual
and spiritual life of the East to set it side by side with what
the West knows as philosophy because there was no phi-
losophy in the East in the same sense there is philosophy
in the West. In this respect the spirit of our age, just be-
ginning, is as yet imperfectly understood.

In the last lecture we spoke of things that men still have
to learn. Above all we must firmly realize how the human
soul, under certain conditions, can actually meet the Be-
ing whom we tried to describe from a certain aspect, calling
him Krishna. We must realize how Arjuna meets that Spirit
who prepared the age of self-consciousness. This knowl-
edge is far more important than any dispute as to whether
it is Sankhya or Vedic philosophy that is contained in the
Bhagavad Gita. To understand it as a real description of
world history — of history and of the color and temper of a
particular age in which living, individual beings are placed
before us — is the important point. We have tried to describe
their natures, speaking of Arjuna’s thoughts and feelings as
characteristic of that time, trying to throw light on the new
age of self-consciousness, and showing how a creative
Spiritual Being preparing for a new age appeared before Ar-
juna. Now, if we seek a living picture of Spiritual Beings in

79

their relation to each other, we need an all-around point
of view to know this Krishna Being more exactly. The fol-
lowing may therefore help us complete our picture of him.

To really penetrate into the region where we can perceive
such a mighty being as Krishna one must have progressed
far enough to be able to have real perceptions and real ex-
periences in the spiritual world. That may seem obvious.
Yet when we consider what people generally expect of the
higher worlds the matter is by no means so self-evident. I
have often indicated that misunderstandings without num-
ber arise from the fact that people wish to lift their lives
into the supersensible world carrying a mass of prejudices
with them. They desire to be led along the path into the
supersensible toward something already familiar to them
in the sense world. In that higher realm one perceives, for
instance, forms, not indeed of gross matter, but forms that
appear as forms of light. One finds that he hears sounds like
the sounds of the physical world. He does not realize that by
expecting such things, by entering the higher world with
such preconceived ideas, he is wanting a spiritual world
just like the sense world though in a refined form. In our
world here man is accustomed to color and brightness, so
he imagines he will only reach the higher realities if the
Beings there appear to him in the same way. It ought not
to be necessary to say all this since the supersensible beings
are far above all attributes of the senses and in their true
form do not appear at all with sense qualities because the
latter presuppose eyes and ears, that is, sense organs. In
the higher worlds, however, we do not perceive by means of
sense organs but by soul organs.

What can happen in this connection I can illustrate by a
childish comparison. Suppose I am describing something
to you, verbally. Then I feel impelled to represent it with a

80

few strokes on the blackboard, thereby materializing what
I have expressed in words. No one would dream of taking
the diagram for the reality. It is the same when we express
what we have experienced supersensibly by giving it form
and color and stamping it in words borrowed from the sense
world. Only that in doing so we do not use our ordinary
intellect, but a higher faculty of feeling that thus translates
the supersensible into sense terms. In such a way our
soul lives into invisible worlds, for instance into that of the
Krishna Being. Then it feels the need of representing to
itself that Being. What it represents, however, is not the
Being himself but a kind of sketch, a supersensible dia-
gram. Such sketches, supersensible illustrations so to say,
are Imaginations. The misunderstanding that so often arises
amounts to this, that we sensualize what the higher forces
of the soul sketch out before us. By thus interpreting it
sensually we lose its real essence. The essence is not con-
tained in these pictures, but through them it must be dimly
felt at first, until by slow degrees we actually begin to see it.

I have mentioned among other things the wonderful
dramatic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. I tried to give
an idea of the form of the first four discourses. This same
dramatic impulse increases from one discourse to the next
as we penetrate on and on into the realms of occult vision.
A sound idea of the artistic composition of this poem may
be suggested by looking to see if there is not a central
point, a climax to this increase of force and feeling. There
are eighteen discourses, therefore we might look for the cli-
max in the ninth. In fact, in the ninth one, that is in the
very middle, we read these striking words, “And now, hav-
ing told thee everything, I will declare to thee the profound-
est secret for the human soul.” Here indeed is a strange
saying that seems to sound abstract yet has deep signifi-

81

cance. Then there follows this most profound mystery. “Un-
derstand me well. I am in all beings, yet they are not in me.”

How often men ask today, “What is the judgment of
true mystic wisdom about this or that?” They want abso-
lute truths, but actually there are no such truths. There are
only truths that hold good in certain contexts, that are true
in definite circumstances and under definite conditions.
Then they are true. This statement, “I am in all beings
but they are not in me,” cannot be taken as an abstractly,
absolutely true statement. Yet this was spoken out of the
deepest wisdom of Krishna at the time when he stood before
Arjuna, and its truth is real and immediate, referring to
Him Who is the creator of man’s inmost being, of his con-
sciousness of self.

Thus, through a wonderful approach we are carried on to
the central point of the Gita, to the ninth discourse where
these words are poured out, to Arjuna. Then, in the
eleventh discourse, another element enters. What may we
expect here, realizing the artistic form of the poem and the
deep occult truths contained in it? When we take up the
ninth and tenth discourses, the very middle of the poem, we
notice a remarkable thing — a peculiar difficulty in imagin-
ing and bringing to life in our souls the ideas presented to
us in this part of the song.

As you begin with the first discourse your soul is borne
along by the continually increasing current of feeling and
idea. First, immortality is the subject. Then you are up-
lifted and inspired by the concepts awakened through Yoga.
All the time your feeling is being borne along by something
in which it can feel at home, one may say. We go still fur-
ther and the poem works up in a wonderful way to the con-
cept of Him Who inspired the age of self-consciousness.
Our enthusiasm is kindled as we approach this Being. All

82

this time we are living in definite, familiar feelings. Then
comes a still greater climax. We are told how the soul can
become ever more free of the outer bodily life. We are led
on to the idea, so familiar to the man of India, of how the
soul can retire into itself, realizing inaction in the actions
the body experiences. The soul can become a complete
whole, independent of outer things as it gradually attains
Yoga and becomes one with Brahma. In the succeeding dis-
courses we see how our certainty of feeling — the feeling
that can still gain nourishment from daily life — gradu-
ally vanishes. Then as we approach the ninth discourse
our soul seems to rise into giddy heights of unknown experi-
ence. If now in these ninth and tenth discourses we try to
make the ideas borrowed from ordinary life suffice, we fail.
As we reach this part of the song we feel as if we
were standing on a summit of mankind’s attainment, born
directly out of the occult depths of life. If we are to under-
stand it, we must bring to it something our soul in its de-
velopment has first to attain by its own effort.

It is remarkable how fine and unerring the composition
of the Bhagavad Gita is in this respect. We can get as far
as the fifth, sixth, or seventh discourse by developing the
concepts given us at the very beginning, in the first discourse.
In the second our soul is awakened to realize the presence of
the eternal in the ever-changing flow of appearance. Then
follows all that passes into the depths of Yoga, from the
third song onward. After that an altogether new mood be-
gins to appear. Whereas the first discourses still have an in-
tellectual quality, reminding us at times of the Western
philosophic mode of thinking, something enters now that
requires Yoga, the devotional mood, for its understanding.
As we continue purifying more and more this mood of
devotion, our soul rises higher in reverence. The Yoga of

83

the first discourses no longer carries us. It ceases, and an
altogether new mood of soul bears us up into the ninth and
tenth discourses because the words here spoken are no
more than a dry, empty sound echoing in our ear if we ap-
proach them intellectually. But they radiate warmth to us if
we approach them devotionally. One who would understand
this sublime poem may start with intellectual understand-
ing and so follow the opening discourses, but as the song
proceeds toward the ninth a deep devotional mood must be
awakened in him. Then the words of the mighty Krishna
will be like wonderful music echoing and re-echoing in his
soul. Whoever reaches this ninth song may feel this
devotional mood as if he must take off his shoes be-
fore treading on holy ground; there he feels he must walk
with reverence. Then follows the eleventh discourse. What
can come next, now that we have reached the climax of this
devotional mood?

When man has risen to the summit where Krishna has
led Arjuna — a height that cannot be attained except in oc-
cult vision or in reverent devotion — it can only be the holy
and formless, the supersensible, that appears before him.
Then the supersensible can be poured out into Imagination.
Then the uplifted and strengthened soul-force that belongs
not to the realm of the intellect but to imaginative percep-
tion, can cast into living pictures what in its essential being
is without form or likeness. This is what happens at the
beginning of the second half of the sublime song — that is
to say, about the eleventh discourse. Here, after due prep-
aration, the Krishna Being to whom Arjuna has been led
step by step, is conjured up before his soul in Imaginations.
This is where the majesty of description in this Eastern
poem appears in its fullness, where Krishna finally appears
in a picture, in an Imagination.

84

We may truly say that experiences such as this, which
only the innermost power of the human soul can undergo,
have almost nowhere else been described in such a wonder-
ful way, so filled with meaning. For those who are able to
realize it the Imagination of Krishna as Arjuna now de-
scribes it will always be of most profound significance. Up
to the tenth discourse we are led on by Krishna as by an in-
spiring Being. Now the radiant bliss of Arjuna’s opened
vision comes before us. Arjuna becomes the narrator, and
describes his Imagination in words so wonderful that one
fears to reproduce them.

“The Gods do I behold in all thy Frame, O God. Also the
hosts of creatures; Brahma the Lord upon His lotus throne;
the Rishis all; the Serpent of Heaven. With many arms and
with many bodies, with many mouths and many eyes I
see Thee, on every side endless in Thy Form. No end, no
center, no beginning see I in Thee, O Lord of All!
Thou, Whom I behold in every form, I see Thee with dia-
dem, with club and sword, a mountain flaming fire, stream-
ing forth on every side — thus do I behold Thee. Dazzled
is my vision. As fire streaming from the radiance of the Sun,
immeasurably great art Thou! Lost beyond all thought,
unperishing, greatest of all Good, thus dost Thou appear to
me in the Heaven’s expanse. Eternal Dharma’s changeless
guardian, Thou! Spirit primeval and Eternal, Thou stand-
est before my soul. Neither source, nor midst, nor end; in-
finite in power, infinite in realms of space. Great are Thine
eyes like to the Moon; yea, like to the Sun itself. And what
streams forth from Thy mouth is as the Fire of Sacrifice. I
look upon Thee in Thy glowing Fire; Thy splendor, warm-
ing all worlds. All that I can dream of between floor of earth
and fields of Heaven, Thy power fills it all. Alone with
Thee I stand. And that heavenly universe wherein the

85

three worlds live, that too doth in Thee dwell, when to my
gaze is shown Thy wondrous, awesome Form. I see whole
hosts of Gods approaching Thee, hymning Thy praise.
Stricken with fear I stand before Thee, folding my hands
in prayer. ‘Hail to Thee!’ cry all the companies of holy
seers and Saints, chanting Thy praises with resounding
songs. Filled with wonder stand multitudes beholding
Thee. Thy Form stupendous with many mouths, arms,
limbs, feet, many bodies, many jaws full of teeth — before
it all the universe doth quake, and I with dread am filled.
Radiant, Thou shakest Heaven. With many arms I see
Thee, and mouth like to vast-flaming eyes. My soul trem-
bles. Nothing firm I find, nor rest, 0 Mighty Krishna, Who
art as Vishnu unto me. I see within Thine awful form, like
unto fire itself. I see how Being works, the end of all the
ages. Nought know I anywhere; no shelter I find. O, be
Thou merciful to me, Thou Lord of all the Gods, refuge of
all the worlds!”

Such is the Imagination that Arjuna beholds when his
soul has been raised to that height where an Imagination
of Krishna is possible. Then we hear what Krishna is echo-
ing across to Arjuna once more as a mighty inspiration. In
reality it is as if it were not merely sounding for the spiritual
ear of Arjuna, but echoing down through all the ages that
followed. At this point we begin dimly to perceive what it
really means when a new impulse is given for a new epoch
in the world’s history, and when the author of this impulse
appears to the clairvoyant gaze of Arjuna. We feel with Ar-
juna. We remind ourselves that he is in the midst of the tur-
moil of battle where brother-blood is pitted against its
like. We know that what Krishna has to give depends above
all upon the old clairvoyant epoch ceasing, together with all

86

that was holy in it, and a new epoch to begin. When we re-
flect on the impulse of this new epoch that was to begin with
fratricide; when we rightly understand the impulse that
forced its way in through all the swaying concepts and in-
stitutions of the preceding epoch; then we get a correct
concept of what Krishna lets Arjuna hear.

“I am time primeval, bringing all worlds to naught, made
manifest on earth to slay mankind I And even though thou
wilt bring them unto death in battle, without thee hath
death taken all the warriors who stand there in their ranks.
Therefore arise; arise without fear. Renown shalt thou
win, and shalt conquer the foe. Rejoice in thy mastery,
and in the victory awaiting thee. It is not thou who wilt
have slain them when they fall in battle. By Me already are
they slain, e’er thou lay them low. The instrument art thou,
nought else than he who fighteth with his arm. The Drona,
the Jayandana, the Bhishma, the Kama and the other
heroes of the strife I have slain. Already they are slain, now
do thou slay, that My work burst forth externally appar-
ent. When they fall dead in Maya, slain by Me, do thou
slay them. And what I have done will through thee become
perceptible. Tremble not! Thou canst not do what I have
not already done. Fight! They whom I have slain will fall
beneath thy sword!”

It was not in order to bring to mankind’s ears the voice
that should speak of slaying that these words were uttered,
but to make them hear the voice that tells that there is a
center in man’s being that has to develop in the age to come;
that into this center there were focussed the highest im-
pulses realizable by man at that time, and that there is
nothing in human evolution with which the human ego is not
connected. Here we find in the Bhagavad Gita something

87

that lifts us up and sets us on the horizon of the whole of
human evolution.

If we let the changing moods of this great poem work
upon us we shall gain much more than those who try to read
into it pedantic doctrines of Sankhya or Yoga philosophies.
If we can only dimly feel the dazzling heights that can be
reached through Yoga, we shall begin to lay hold on the
meaning and spirit of such a mighty Imagination as that of
Arjuna presented to us here. Even as an image it is so sub-
lime and forceful that we are able to form some lofty con-
ception of the creative spirit, which in Krishna is grafted
onto the world. The highest impulse that can speak to
the individual man speaks through Krishna to Arjuna. The
highest to which the individual man can lift himself by rais-
ing to their full pitch all the powers that reside within his
being — that is Krishna. The highest to which he can soar
by training himself and working on himself with wisdom —
that is Krishna.

When we think of the evolution of humanity all over the
earth, and trace it through as we are able to do by means of
what is given, for example, in our occult science; when
in this sense we see the earth as the place where man has
first been brought to the ego through many different stages
following one another and developing from age to age; when
we thus follow the course of evolution through the epochs
of time; then we may say to ourselves that here then on earth
these souls have been planted; the highest they can attain
is to become free souls. Free — that is what men will become
if they bring to full development all the forces latent within
them as individual souls. In order to make this possible
Krishna was active, indirectly and almost imperceptibly at
first, then ever more definitely, and at last quite directly in
the period we have been describing. In all of earthly evo-

88

lution there is no Being who could give the individual hu-
man soul so much as Krishna.

I say expressly the individual soul because — and I say
this deliberately — on earth there exists not only the in-
dividual human soul but also mankind. Consider this in
connection with all I have tried to give about Krishna, be-
cause on earth there are all those concerns that do not be-
long to the individual alone. Imagine a person feeling the
inner impulse to perfect himself as far as ever a human soul
can. Such might be. Then, each person separately and by
himself might go on developing indefinitely. But there is
mankind. For this earthly planet there are matters that
bring it into connection with the whole universe. With the
Krishna Impulse coming into each individual soul, let us
assume every soul would have developed in itself a higher
impulse; not immediately, nor even up to the present time,
but sometime in the future. So that from the age of self-
consciousness onward the stream of mankind’s collective
evolution would have split up. Individual souls would have
progressed and unfolded to the highest point, but separately,
dispersed, broken apart from each other. Their paths
would have gone further and further apart as the Krishna
Impulse worked in each one. Human existence would have
been uplifted in the sense that souls individualized them-
selves and so lifted themselves out of the common cur-
rent, developing their self-life to the utmost. In this way the
ancient time would have shone into the future like
many, many rays from a single star. Every one of these rays
would have proclaimed the glory of Krishna far into future
cosmic eras. This is the path on which mankind was
travelling in the sixth or eighth centuries before the founda-
tion of Christianity.

Then from the opposite side something else came in.

89

The Krishna Impulse comes into man’s soul when from the
depths of his own inner being he works, creates, and draws
forth his powers more and more until he may rise into those
realms where he may reach Krishna. But something came
toward humanity from outside, which men could never have
reached through the forces that lived within themselves;
something bending down to each individual one. Thus the
souls that were separating and isolating themselves en-
countered the same Being who came down out of the Cos-
mic Universe into the age of self-consciousness from out-
side. It came in such a way that it belonged to the whole
of humanity, to all the earth. This other impulse came
from the opposite side. It was the Christ.

Though put rather abstractly for the present, we see
how a continually increasing individualization was prepared
and brought about in mankind, and how then those souls
who had the impulse to individualize themselves more and
more were met by the Christ Impulse, leading them once
more together into a common humanity. What I have tried
to indicate has been a rather preliminary description of the
two impulses from the Christ and Krishna. I have tried to
show how closely the two impulses come together in the age
of the mid-point of evolution, even though they come from
diametrically opposite directions. We can make very great
mistakes by confusing these two revelations. What I have
developed today in a rather general way we will make more
concrete in the succeeding lectures. But I would close to-
day with a few words that may simply and clearly summar-
ize what these two impulses are — truly the most important
in human evolution.

If we look back to all that happened between the tenth
century before Christ and the tenth century afterward, we

90

may say that into the universe the Krishna Impulse flowed
for every individual human soul, and into the earth the
Christ Impulse came for all mankind.

Observe that for those who can think specifically, “all man-
kind” by no means signifies the same as the mere sum total
of all individual human souls.

9i

VII

It IS NATURAL, though it is usually ignored by science,
that man as he is simply cannot know one part of his be-
ing. As he looks out upon the world it shows itself, roughly
expressed, as an ascending scale from the mineral kingdom
through the plant and animal kingdoms up to man. It goes
without saying that man must assume some creative jorce
behind all the forms he perceives around him in the king-
doms of nature. The point is, however, that man gains
knowledge of the world he lives in just because the mineral,
plant, and animal kingdoms are outside him and he can ob-
serve them. As to all man has within himself, however, he
can only gain knowledge of that insofar as the same forces
are at work in him as are active in the three kingdoms of
nature outside him. The forces active within him which
transcend those three kindgoms he cannot know by the
usual methods of knowing nature — not in the least. It is just
what man has within himself over and above the kingdoms
of nature that enables him to build up systematically
a knowledge of those kingdoms outside him. Just as little
as the eye, whose purpose it is to see outwardly, can see it-
self, just so little can man gain knowledge of what in himself
is there in order that he may acquire knowledge. This is a
very simple idea, but sound.

92

It is impossible for the eye to see itself because it is there
to see out, and it is impossible for those forces in man that
are there to acquire outer knowledge, to acquire knowledge
of themselves. Further, it is these very forces that rep-
resent what it is in man that makes him something more
than an animal. Materialistic Darwinism disposes of this
fact easily by simply leaving out of account the fact that
this special human power of acquiring knowledge itself can-
not be known by man’s usual instrument for knowledge.
Recognizing that this power is unknowable, science denies
its existence and accordingly considers man only insofar
as he is still animal. You see on what the peculiar fallacy,
the illusion of materialistic Darwinism rests. Man cannot
know in himself those forces that are the actual means of
knowledge. But the eye can see another eye, and for this
reason, other things being equal, it can believe in itself.
With the faculty of knowledge this is not the case. It would
be logically possible for a man to confront another man and
perceive in him the knowing faculty that raises him above
animals. Logically, that is. But even that is actually im-
possible, for the very reasons implied in what we have de-
scribed previously about the effects of thinking.

What does ordinary knowledge involve in the external
world? We saw that it involves a perpetual destruction of
the nerve structures in the brain. This is an actual external
process. The creative forces on the other hand — those that
really distinguish man from the animal — cannot develop at
all in our waking life when we normally acquire knowledge.
In this life they must behave so as not to interfere with the
wearing away of the nerve structures. Therefore in waking
life these forces are at rest. They sleep.

We have recognized a great truth if we can thoroughly en-
ter into the thought that all that would have to be known to

93

realize the full fallacy of materialistic Darwinism, even on
the physical plane, is actually asleep in our waking life;
that what raises man above the animal is at rest and a de-
structive process is taking place. The creative forces that
bring forth the animal organism are not so far perfected
as those at work in the organism of man. In our waking life
the latter are inactive, and the process that takes their place
is perpetually destroying just what in man transcends the
animal. These very creative forces are destroyed during
waking life. They are not present at all, but during sleep
they appear and begin building up again what has been de-
stroyed. These creative forces that raise man above the
animal can really be perceived in a sleeping man. So we
should have to say that whatever it is that repairs in sleep-
ing man the forces he spends in his waking life, must be the
forces that raise him above the animals.

These forces are still unknown to external natural science,
which is only beginning to surmise them. Science, how-
ever, is on the way and one day will reveal these forces by
purely external methods. Indeed, there are already ex-
ceptions to the statement that the forces leading man out
beyond the animal nature are ordinarily unobservable in
him. When science once learns to distinguish these forces
in man it will discover in the sleeping human body the physi-
cal evidence of man’s transcending the animal kingdom.
When it distinguishes the regenerative forces in man from
what is present in the animal kingdom also, it will recognize
how the creative forces active in the earth’s life to raise
man beyond the animal are awake only when man sleeps.
From all this we can gather that in self-knowledge man’s
creative forces, the real human forces, can only be per-
ceived by man when he becomes clairvoyant during sleep;
that is, when in a condition otherwise like sleep he awakes

94

clairvoyantly. In the fifth lecture we already indicated this
fact.

Today I have said that to some extent, from the processes
observable in sleeping man, science will after a time find in-
dications of the forces whereby man transcends the animal,
but they will only be indications. These forces, when they
appear to clairvoyant consciousness today, are seen to be of
such a nature that they cannot be revealed externally to the
senses in their true form. It will be possible to indicate their
existence by deductions from scientific facts. Apart from
their not being perceptible in their essence there is quite an-
other reason why it will become possible to discover them if
not to perceive them. These human creative forces have a
very special relation to all the other forces of nature. We
are here approaching a difficult subject, but it may be pos-
sible to make it clear in the following way.

Let us imagine we have here the receiver of an air-pump,
say a glass bell-jar, and suppose we succeed in making a
really perfect vacuum inside it. That is very nearly possi-
ble ordinarily. Everyone whose intellect is bound to the
world of sense will now say, “Inside there is no air, only an
empty space; we cannot go any farther, there cannot be
less than no air inside. Actually that is not true. We can
pump until no air at all is left, then go on pumping until we
get a space still more empty of air than a vacuum. People
dependent on the material will find it difficult to imagine
this “less than nothing.” Or, suppose you have ten shillings
in your pocket. You can gradually spend them until
you have nothing left. In this domain of life there is a
real “less than nothing.” It is often one of the strong-
est realities — you can go into debt for a few shillings. In
practical life less-than-nothing is often more intensely real
than the reality of possession.

95

It is remarkable what things are sometimes accepted as
axioms, as obvious truths. Thus, you can read in many
Western philosophic books that there can nowhere be less
than nothing, that there is no such thing. Even more, it
is sometimes said that nothing itself cannot exist. Yet,
what exists in our illustration about debt exists also in
the universe. All philosophic dicta about “nothing,” how-
ever pretentious the form they take, are really rubbish.
They are themselves a kind of ill-defined nothingness. It is
true that the physical something that surrounds us can be
reduced to nothing, and then still further to less than
nothing. This “nothing” actually is a real factor on all
sides. We must imagine the world that surrounds us,
which we know in the forces of nature throughout the min-
eral, plant and animal kingdoms, reduced down to nothing,
then down to below nothing. Then it is that those forces
arise that are creatively active in man when he sleeps. Nat-
ural science knows only the external side of these forces.
In fact, it holds fast to a mere abstraction about them and
therefore cannot enter into or appreciate them because or-
dinary science is to the reality in the forces of nature as
the abstract number ten, for example, is to ten beans or
ten apples. If we eliminate quality and say that all these are
“ten” and nothing else, we are doing what natural science
does, making no distinctions, touching only the surface of
things. Suppose it gains the idea that regenerative forces
must be present building up the organism again in sleep,
then it will treat these forces as does a man who, when some-
one meets him saying, “I have fifteen shillings in my
pocket,” replies, “Not so, you have fifteen.” The man leaves
out of account the very thing that matters. Consequently
science will confuse these forces with the ordinary natural

96

laws, and will fail to recognize that higher laws are at work
in them.

I mention all this to show what difficulties external science
has and must have in getting to know the truth. It will draw
certain conclusions and thus come near the truth. For some
persons this will not be necessary, because science will
gradually be supplemented by clairvoyant perception that
does experience the difference between these forces and
those active out in the three kingdoms of nature. At present
I cannot deal fully with the superficial objection that ani-
mals also sleep. Such objections have little logical value
but people do not notice it, nor their superficiality, for they
judge according to concepts instead of the real nature of
things. By introducing animal sleep into the argument one
would speak the same fallacy as if someone were to say, “I
sharpen my pencil with a knife and I also shave with
a knife,” and another person replied, “That is impossible,
knives are there to cut meat.” People are always making
that kind of judgment. They think that a given thing must
have the same function in different realms of nature. Sleep
is an altogether different function in man from what it is in
the animals.

I wanted to call your attention to forces at work in man’s
nature that we find at first in the regeneration of his organism
as he sleeps. Now these forces are closely related to other
forces, those that also develop in man with a certain uncon-
sciousness. I mean the forces having to do with the propa-
gation of the race. We know that up to a certain age man’s
consciousness is filled with a pure and straightforward un-
consciousness of these forces; the innocence of childhood.
Then at a certain age this consciousness awakens. From
that time onward the human organism is permeated by an

97

awareness of the forces afterward known as sensual sex-
love.

What in earlier life lives as a sleeping force and only
wakens with puberty, seen in its original and essential form
is the very same as those forces that in sleep regenerate the
outworn forces in man. Only they are hidden by the other
parts of human nature in which they are mingled. Invisibly
in man there are at work forces that can become capable
of either good or evil only when they awaken, but that sleep,
or at most dream, until the time of puberty. Since the forces
that manifest themselves afterward must first be prepared,
they are intermingled, though not yet awake, with the re-
maining forces in man even from birth onward. All this time
his nature is permeated by these sleeping forces. This is
what meets us in the child as such a wonderful mystery. It
is the sleeping generative forces that only waken later on.
One who is sensitive to these things feels something like a
gentle breath of God in the activity of these forces with-
drawn into reticence in childhood, whatever the naughti-
ness, obstinacy and other more or less unpleasant char-
acteristics a child may have. These innocent qualities of the
child are those of the grown-up person, but in childlike form.
One who recognizes them as among the generative forces
feels the breath of divine powers. While in later life they
appear in man’s lower nature, they are so wonderful be-
cause they really breathe the pure breath of God so long as
they work in unconscious innocence. We must feel these
things and be sensitive to them, then we shall perceive how
wonderfully human nature is composed. The generative
forces, sleeping during the most tender age of childhood,
waken around the time of puberty, and from then on are still
active in innocence when at night man sinks back into sleep.

Thus man’s nature falls into two parts. In every human

98

being two persons confront us — the one that we are from
the time we waken until we go to sleep, the other, from go-
ing to sleep to waking again. In our waking state we are
continually at pains to wear and worry our nature down to
the animal level with all that is not pure knowledge, pure
spiritual activity. What raises us above humanity holds
sway like a pure, sublime force within the generative powers
as they were during innocent childhood, and then in sleep it
is awakened in the regeneration of what is worn away
in waking life. So we have in ourselves one person who is
related to the creative forces in man, and another who de-
stroys them.

The deeply significant thing in the double nature of man
is, that behind all that the senses perceive we have to surmise
another man, one in whom the creative forces dwell. This
second man is really never there in a pure, unmixed form;
not during waking life nor even in sleep because in sleep
the physical and etheric bodies still remain permeated by
the after-effects of waking life, by the disturbing and de-
structive forces. When at last the latter have been removed
altogether, we wake up again.

So it has been since what we call the Lemurian Age, the
beginning, strictly speaking, of present-day mankind’s evo-
lution. At that time, as is described in greater detail in my
Occult Science, the Luciferic influence on man set in; and
from this influence there came, among other things, what
today compels man continually to wear and tear himself
down to the animal nature. The other element that exists in
human nature, which man as he is now does not yet know —
the creative forces in him — all this came into play in the
early Lemurian time before the Luciferic impulses entered.
Thus we rise in thought from man ‘become’ to man ‘be-
coming’; from man created to man being re-created. In

99

so doing we have to look out into that distant Lemurian time
when man was as yet wholly permeated by the creating
forces. At that time man came into being as he is today. If
we follow the human race from that epoch onward, we have
this double nature of man continually before us in all that
has happened since. Man then entered a kind of lower na-
ture.

At the same time, as we can see clairvoyantly by looking
back into the Akashic record, there appeared beside ordi-
nary people, who themselves were permeated by the human
creative forces, something like a brother- or sister-soul; a
definite soul. It was as though this sister-soul was held back,
not thrown into the current of human evolution. It re-
mained permeated through and through by human creative
forces only, and by nothing else. Thus, a brother- or sister-
soul (in that ancient time there was no difference) — Adam’s
brother-soul — remained behind. It could not enter the
physical process of mankind’s development. It lived on, in-
visible to the physical world of man. It was not born as men
are born, in the flowing stream of this life, because if it had
entered into birth and death it would have been in the
processes of physical human life. It could only be perceived
by those who rose to the heights of clairvoyance, who de-
veloped those forces that awaken in the state we otherwise
know as sleep. In that state man is near to the forces that
live and work in purity in the sister-soul.

Man entered his evolution, but holding sway above this
life there lived, in sacrifice, a soul that throughout all the
processes of human life never came down in bodily form. It
did not strive like ordinary human souls for birth and death
in successive incarnations, and it could only show itself to
them when in their sleep they attained clairvoyant vision.
Yet it worked on mankind wherever they could meet it

ioo

with special clairvoyant gifts. There were men who either
by nature or special training in schools of initiation had this
power and were able to recognize the creative forces.
Wherever such schools are mentioned in history we can al-
ways find evidence that they were aware of a soul accom-
panying mankind. In most instances it was only recogniz-
able in those special conditions of clairvoyance that ex-
pand man’s spiritual vision into sleep consciousness.

When Arjuna stood on the battle-field with the Kurus
and Pandus arrayed against each other, when he felt all
that was going on around him and deeply realized the unique
situation in which he was placed, it came about that this soul
we have mentioned spoke to him through the soul of his
charioteer. The manifestation of this special soul, speak-
ing through a human soul, is none other than Krishna. For
what soul was it that could instil into man the impulse to
consciousness of self? It was the soul that had remained
behind in the old Lemurian age when men entered his
actual earthly evolution.

This soul had often been visible in manifestations before,
but in a far more spiritual form. At the moment, however,
of which the Bhagavad Gita tells us, we have to imagine a
kind of embodiment, though much concealed in Maya of
this soul of Krishna. Later on in history a definite incarna-
tion takes place. This soul actually incarnated in the body
of a child. Those of our friends to whom I have spoken
of this before know that at the time when Christianity was
founded two children were born in different families, both
from the house of David. The one child is mentioned in St.
Matthew’s Gospel, the other in St. Luke’s. This is the true
reason for the external discrepancies between the two Gos-
pels. Now this very Jesus Child of St. Luke’s Gospel is an
incarnation of that same soul that had never before lived

IOI

in a human body but is nevertheless a human soul, having
been one in the ancient Lemurian age. This is the same that
revealed itself as Krishna.

Thus we have all that the Krishna impulse signifies incar-
nated in the body of the Luke Jesus child. What was there
embodied is related to the forces that are asleep in every
child in their sublime purity and innocence, until they
awaken as the sex-forces. In this child they can manifest
themselves and be active until the age of puberty when man
ordinarily becomes sexually mature. But the body of this
child that had been taken from common humanity would
no longer have been adapted to the forces related to the in-
nocent sex-forces in the child. Thus the soul in the other
Jesus child, which was the soul of Zarathustra, that had
passed through many incarnations and reached its eminence
by hard work and special striving, passed over into the
body of the Luke Jesus child, and from then on dwelt in
that body.

We touch here upon a wonderful mystery. We see how
into the body of the Luke Jesus child there enters the soul
of man as he was before he descended into the course of
earthly incarnations. We understand that this soul could
hold sway in the human body only until the twelfth year of
its life. After that another soul must take possession, the
Zarathustra soul that had gone through all the transforma-
tions of mankind. This wonderful mystery is enacted, that
the innermost essence and self of man, which we have seen
hailed as Krishna, permeates the Jesus child of the Luke Gos-
pel. In this child are the innermost forces of humanity,
the Krishna forces, for indeed we know their origin. This
Krishna root takes us back into the Lemurian time, the very
primeval age of man. At that time it was one with humanity,
before ever the physical evolution of mankind began. In

102

later time this root, these Krishna forces, flowing together
and uniting in the unknown and unseen, worked to bring
about the unfolding of man’s inner being from within. Con-
cretely embodied, this root is present within a single being,
the Luke Jesus child, and as the child grows up it remains
active beneath the surface of life in this special body after
the Zarathustra soul has entered it.

In the thirtieth year, in the moment the Bible describes
as the Baptism in Jordan, there comes toward this special
human body what now belongs to all mankind. This is the
moment indicated in the words, “This is my well-beloved
Son, this day have I begotten Him.” Christ now comes to-
ward the physical body from the other side. In the body
that stands before us there, we have in concrete form what
yesterday we thought of abstractly. What belongs to all
mankind comes to the body that contains what, through an-
other impulse, has brought the inner being of man to the
highest ideal of individual strength, and will carry it to
yet greater heights.

I think when you consider all that has been said today,
leading up as it does to a certain understanding of that great
moment pictorially represented as the baptism by St. John,
you will have to admit that our anthroposophical out-
look takes nothing away from the sublime majesty of the
Christ-Idea. On the contrary, by shedding the light of un-
derstanding upon it much is added to all that can be given
to mankind exoterically. Today I have endeavored to pre-
sent the matter in such a way as to give it sense and mean-
ing for those who can consider it with an open mind, in the
light of external human history. That is not the way, how-
ever, by which this secret was found. Someone might ask, in
view of the lectures about St. Luke’s Gospel I delivered years
ago in Basel, when for the first time I drew attention to

103

the different genealogies of the two Jesus children, “Why did
you not explain then all you have added to it now?” That
depends on the whole way these things were discovered.
Actually, this truth has never yet been found in one single
and complete whole by the human understanding. It was
not discovered in the form I have tried to convey it today.
The truth itself was there first, as I indicated in a lecture a
few days ago, and the rest followed of its own accord, add-
ing itself to the main body of this piece of knowledge about
the two Jesus-children. From this you may gather that in
the Anthroposophical Movement for which I am permitted
to stand before you, there is nothing of the nature of intel-
lectual or logical construction. I do not mean to lay this
down as a general rule for everybody, but I do regard it as
my own personal task to say nothing that is given by the
intellect as such but to take things in the way they are di-
rectly and immediately given to occult vision. Only after-
ward are they permeated with the power of understanding.
The truth about the two Jesus-children was not discovered
by external historical research, but from the beginning it
was an occult fact. Afterward the connection with the
Krishna mystery was revealed.

You see in this how the science of man will have to work
into the occult realm in the age we are entering; how the
fundamental impulses of earthly evolution will gradually be
understood and realized by individual persons, and how
this will throw more and more light on all that has hap-
pened in the past. True science will not only speak to the
intellect, but will fill the whole soul of man. It is just when
we make ourselves acquainted with occult facts that we have
a feeling for the real majesty, the greatness and wonder of
these facts. Truly, the more deeply we penetrate the world
of reality the more we have this feeling of wonder. Not

104

only our intellect and reason but our whole soul is illumined
when we let the truth come to us in this way. Especially at
such a point as this, that wondrous event when the whole
inwardness of humanity lived in a human body; when a
soul that had developed upward to this point through the
whole course of earthly life took possession of this body;
then from outside there came into this body during three
years of its life something that was vouchsafed to all man-
kind from the great universe beyond. Truly this can stir
our souls to their depths. The spiritual age that is dawning
will in time make it possible to deepen points like this still
more.

One thing is essential to the coming spiritual age. We
must learn to take a different attitude toward the great rid-
dles and secrets of the cosmos, to approach them not as in
the past with reason and intellect alone, but with all the
faculties of our soul. Then we shall ourselves become par-
takers in the whole of human evolution. It will be for us like
a fountain of sublime, all-human consciousness. We shall
have fullness of soul. We shall feel that we may belong to
that humanity that over all the earth is to develop such im-
pulses as have been the subject of our thoughts today.

VIII

If WE WANT to approach such a creation as the sublime
Bkagavad Gita with full understanding it is necessary
for us to attune our souls to it, so to say; bring them into
that manner of thought and feeling that really lies at the ba-
sis of such a work. This is specially true for people who,
through their situation and circumstances, are as far re-
moved from this great poem as are the people of the West.
It is natural for us to make a contemporary work our own
without much difficulty. It is also natural that those who
belong to a certain nation should always have an immediate
feeling for a work that has sprung directly out of the sub-
stance of that nation, even though it might belong to a pre-
vious age. The population of the West (not those of south-
ern Asia), however, is altogether remote in sentiment and
feeling from the Bhagavad Gita.

If we would approach it then with understanding we must
prepare ourselves for the very different mood of soul, the
different spirit that pervades it. Such appalling misunder-
standings can arise when people imagine they can approach
this poem without first working on their own souls. A crea-
tion coming over to us from a strange race, from the ninth
or tenth century before the foundation of Christianity, can-
not be understood as directly by the people of the West as,

106

say, the Kalevala by the Finnish people, or the Homeric
poems by the Greeks. If we would enter into the matter
further we must once more bring together different ma-
terials that can show us the way to enter into the spirit of
this wonderful poem.

Here I would above all draw attention to one thing. The
summits of spiritual life have at all times been concealed
from the wide plain of human intelligence. So it has re-
mained, in a certain sense, right up to our present age. It is
true that one of the characteristics of our age, which is only
now dawning and which we have somewhat described, will
be that certain things hitherto kept secret and really known
to but very few will be spread abroad into large circles.
That is the reason why you are present here, because our
movement is the beginning of this spreading abroad of facts
that until now have remained secret from the masses. Per-
haps some subconscious reason that brought you to the an-
throposophical view of the world and into this spiritual
movement, came precisely from the feeling that certain se-
crets must today be poured out into all people. Until our
time, however, these facts remained secret not because they
were deliberately kept so, but because it lay in the natural
course of man’s development that they had to remain secret.
It is said that the secrets of the old Mysteries were pro-
tected from the profane by certain definite, strictly observed
rules. Far more than by rule, these secrets were protected
by a fundamental characteristic of mankind in olden times,
namely, that they simply could not have understood these
secrets. This fact was a much more powerful protection
than any external rule could be.

This has been, for certain facts, especially the case dur-
ing the materialistic age. What I am about to say is extreme
heresy from the point of view of our time. For example,

107

there is nothing better protected in the regions of Central
Europe than Fichte’s philosophy. Not that it is kept secret,
for his teachings are printed and are read. But they are not
understood. They remain secrets. In this way much that
will have to enter the general development of mankind will
remain occult knowledge though it is published and re-
vealed in the light of day.

Not only in this sense but in a rather different one too,
there is a peculiarity of human evolution that is important
concerning those ideas we must have in order to understand
the Bhagavad Gita. Everything we may call the mood, the
mode of feeling, the mental habit of ancient India from
which the Gita sprang, was also in its full spirituality ac-
cessible to the understanding of only a few. What one
age has produced by the activity of a few, remains secret
in regard to its real depth, even afterward when it passes
over and becomes the property of a whole people. Again,
this is a peculiar trait in the evolution of man, which is full
of wisdom though it may at first seem paradoxical. Even
for the contemporaries of the Bhagavad Gita and for their
followers, for the whole race to which this summit of spirit-
ual achievement belongs, and for its posterity, its teaching
remained a secret. The people who came later did not know
the real depth of this spiritual current. It is true that in the
centuries following there grew up a certain religious belief
in its teachings, combined with great fervor of feeling, but
with this there was no deepening of perception. Neither
the contemporaries nor those who followed developed a
really penetrating understanding of this poem. In the time
between then and now there were only a few who really
understood it.

Thus it comes about that in the judgment of posterity
what was once present as a strong and special spiritual

108

movement is greatly distorted and falsified. As a rule we
cannot find the way to come near to an understanding of
some reality by studying the judgments of the descendants
of the race that produced it. So, in the deep sentiments and
feelings of the people of India today we will not find real
understanding for the spiritual tendency that in the deepest
sense permeates the Bhagavad Gita . We will find enthusi-
asm, strong feeling and fervent belief in abundance, but not
a deep perception of its meaning. This is specially true of
the age just passed, from the fourteenth and fifteenth to the
nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, it is most especially
true for the people who confess that religion. There is one
anecdote that like many others reveals a deep truth — how a
great European thinker said on his deathbed, “Only one per-
son understood me, and he misunderstood me.”

It can also be said of this age that has just run its course,
that it contained some spiritual substance that represents
a great height of achievement but in the widest circles has
remained unknown as to its real nature, even to its con-
temporaries. Here is something to which I would like to
draw your attention. Without doubt, among the present
people of the East, and of India, some exceptionally clever
people can be found. By the whole configuration of their
mind and soul, however, they are already far from under-
standing those feelings poured out in the Bhagavad Gita .
Consider how these people receive from Western civilization
a way of thought that does not reach to the depths but is
merely superficial understanding. This has a twofold re-
sult. For one, it is easy for the Eastern peoples, particularly
for the descendants of the Bhagavad Gita people, to develop
something that may easily make them feel how far behind
a superficial Western culture is in relation to what has al-
ready been given by their great poem. In effect they still

109

have more ways of approach to the meaning of that poem
than to the deeper contents of Western spiritual and in-
tellectual life. Then there are others in India who would
gladly be ready to receive such spiritual substance as is
contained, let us say, in the works of Solovieff, Hegel
and Fichte, to mention a few of many spiritualized thinkers.
Many Indian thinkers would like to make these ideas their
own.

I once experienced something of this kind. At the begin-
ning of our founding of the German Section in our move-
ment an Indian thinker sent me a dissertation. He sent it
to many other Europeans besides. In this he tried to com-
bine what Indian philosophy can give, with important Euro-
pean concepts, such as might be gained in real truth — so
he implied — if one entered deeply into Hegel and Fichte.
In spite of the person’s honest effort the whole essay was of
no use whatever. I do not mean to say anything against it,
rather I would praise his effort, but the fact is, what this
man produced could only appear utter dilettantism to any-
one who had access to the real concepts of Fichte and He-
gel. There was nothing to be done with the whole thing.

Here we have a person who honestly endeavors to pene-
trate a later spiritual stream altogether different from his
own point of view, but he cannot get through the hindrances
that time and evolution put in his way. Nevertheless, when
he attempts to penetrate them, untrue and impossible stuff
is the result. Later I heard a lecture by another person, who
does not know what European spiritual evolution really
is, and what its depths contain. He lectured in support of
the same Indian thinker. He was a European who had
learned the arguments of the Indian thinker and was bring-
ing them forward as spiritual wisdom before his followers.
They too of course were ignorant of the fact that they were

no

listening to something which rested on a wrong kind of in-
tellectual basis. For one who could look keenly into what
the European gave out, it was simply terrible. If you will
forgive the expression, it was enough to give one the creeps.
It was one misunderstanding grafted onto another misun-
derstanding. So difficult is it to comprehend all that the hu-
man soul can produce. We must make it our ideal to truly
understand all the masterpieces of the human spirit. If
we feel this ideal through and through and consider what
has just been said, we shall gain a ray of light to show us
how difficult of access the Bhagavad Gita really is. Also, we
shall realize how untold misunderstandings are possible,
and how harmful they can be.

We in the West can well understand how the people of the
East can look up to the old creative spirits of earlier times,
whose activity flows through the Vedantic philosophy and
permeates the Sankhya philosophy with its deep meaning.
We can understand how the Eastern man looks up with rev-
erence to that climax of spiritual achievement that appears
in Shankaracharya seven or eight centuries after the foun-
dation of Christianity. All this we can realize, but we must
think of it in another way also if we want to attain a really
deep understanding. To do so we must set up something as
a kind of hypothesis, for it has not yet been realized in evo-
lution.

Let us imagine that those who were the creators of that
sublime spirituality that permeates the Vedas, the Vedantic
literature, and the philosophy of Shankaracharya, were to
appear again in our time with the same spiritual faculty,
the same keenness of perception they had when they were
in the world in that ancient epoch. They would have come
in touch with spiritual creations like those of Solovieff, He-
gel, and Fichte. What would they have said? We are sup-

in

posing it does not concern us what the adherents of those
ancient philosophies say, but what those spirits themselves
would say. I am aware that I am going to say something
paradoxical, but we must think of what Schopenhauer
once said. “There is no getting away from it, it is the sad
fate of truth that it must always become paradoxical in the
world. Truth is not able to sit on the throne of error, there-
fore it sits on the throne of time, and appeals to the guar-
dian angel of time. So great, however, is the spread of that
angel’s mighty wings that the individual dies within a sin-
gle beat.” So we must not shrink from the fact that truth
must needs appear paradoxical. The following does also,
but it is true.

If the poets of the Vedas, the founders of Sankhya phi-
losophy, even Shankaracharya himself, had come again in
the nineteenth century and had seen the creations of So-
lovieff, Hegel and Fichte, all those great men would have
said, “What we were striving for back in that era, what we
hoped our gift of spiritual vision would reveal to us, these
three men have achieved by the very quality and tenor of
their minds. We thought we must rise into heights of clair-
voyant vision, then on these heights there would appear be-
fore us what permeates the souls of these nineteenth cen-
tury men quite naturally, almost as a matter of course!

This sounds paradoxical to those Western people who in
childlike unconsciousness look to the people of the East,
comparing themselves with them, and all the while quite
misunderstanding what the West actually contains. A pe-
culiarly grotesque picture. We imagine those founders of
Indian philosophy looking up fervently to Fichte and other
Western thinkers; and along with them we see a number of
people today who do not value the spiritual substance of
Europe but grovel in the dust before Shankaracharya and

1 12

those before him while they themselves are not concerned
with the achievements of such as Hegel, Fichte and So-
lovieff. Why is this so? Only by such an hypothesis can we
understand all the facts history presents to us.

We shall understand this if we look up into those times
from which the spiritual substance of the Bhagavad Gita
flowed. Let us imagine the man of that period somewhat as
follows. What appears to a person today in varied ways
in his dream-consciousness — the pictorial imagination of
dream-life — was in that ancient time the normal content of
man’s soul, his everyday consciousness. His was a dream-
like, picture consciousness, by no means the same as it
was in the Old Moon epoch but much more evolved. This was
the condition out of which men’s souls were passing on in
the descending line of evolution. Still earlier was what we
call sleep-consciousness, a state wholly closed to us today,
from which a kind of inspiration, dream-like, came to men.
It was the state closed to us today during our sleep.
As dream-consciousness is for us, so was this sleep-con-
sciousness for those ancient men. It found its way into their
normal picture-consciousness much as dream-conscious-
ness does for us, but more rarely. In another respect also
it was somewhat different in those times. Our dream-con-
sciousness today generally brings up recollections of our
ordinary life. Then, when sleep-consciousness could still
penetrate the higher worlds, it gave men recollections of
those spiritual worlds. Then gradually this consciousness de-
scended lower and lower.

Anyone who at that time was striving as we do today in
our occult education, aimed for something quite differ-
ent. When we today go through our occult development we
are aware that we have gone downhill to our everyday con-
sciousness and are now striving upward. Those seekers

ii3

were also striving upward, from their everyday dream-con-
sciousness. What was it then that they attained? With all
their pains it was something altogether different from what
we are trying to attain. If someone had offered those men
my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds they would have
had no use for it at all. What it contains would have been
foolishness for that ancient time; it has sense only for man-
kind today. Then, everything those men did with their Yoga
and the Sankhya was a striving toward a height that we have
reached in the most profound works of our time, in those
of the three European thinkers I have mentioned. They
were striving to grasp the world in ideas and concepts.
Therefore, one who really penetrates the matter finds no
difference — apart from differences of time, mood, form and
quality of feeling — between our three thinkers and the Ve-
dantic philosophy. At that time the Vedantic philosophy
was that to which men were striving upward; today it has
come down and is accessible to everyday consciousness.

If we would describe the condition of our souls in this
connection we may say to begin with that we have a sleep-
consciousness that for us is closed but for the ancient peo-
ple of India was still permeated by the light of spiritual vi-
sion. What we are now striving for lay hidden in the depths
of the future for them. I mean what we call Imaginative
Knowledge, fully conscious picture-consciousness, per-
meated by the sense of the ego; fully conscious Imagination
as it is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. So
much for the technical point that should be inserted here. In
these abstract technicalities lies something far more im-
portant, that if the man of today will only vigorously make
use of the forces present in his soul, what the men of the
Bhagavad Gita era strove for with all their might lies right
at his hand. It really does, even if only for a Solovieff, a

Fichte or a Hegel. There is something more. What
today can be found right at hand was in those ancient times
attained by application of all the keenness of vision of San-
khya, and the deep penetration of Yoga. It was attained by
effort and pain, by sublime effort to lift the mind.

Now imagine how different the situation is for a man
who, for example, lives at the top of a mountain, has his
house there and is continually enjoying the magnificent
view, from that of a man who has never once seen the view
but has to toil upward with trouble and pain from the val-
ley. If you have the view every day you get accustomed to
it. It is not in the concepts, in their content, that the achieve-
ments of Shankaracharya, of the Vedic poets, and of their
successors are different from those of Hegel and Fichte.
The difference lies in the fact that Shankaracharya’s pred-
ecessors were striving upward from the valley to the sum-
mit; that it was their keenness of mind in Sankhya philos-
ophy, their deepening of soul in Yoga, that led them there.
It was in this work, this overcoming of the soul, that the ex-
perience lay. It is the experience, not the content of thought
that is important here.

This is the immensely significant thing, something from
which we may in a certain sense derive comfort because
the European does not value what we can find right at
hand. Europeans prefer the form in which it meets them in
Vedantic and Sankhya philosophies, because there, with-
out knowing it, they value the great efforts that achieved it.
That is the personal side of the matter. It makes a differ-
ence whether you find a certain content of thought here or
there, or whether you attain it by the severest effort of the
soul. It is the soul’s work that gives a thing its life. This
we must take into account. What was once attained alone
by Shankaracharya and by the deep training of Yoga can

be found today right at hand, even if only by men like those
we have named.

This is not a matter for abstract commentaries. We only
need the power to transplant ourselves into the living feel-
ings of that time. Then we begin to understand that the
external expressions themselves, the outer forms of the
ideas, were experienced quite differently by the men of that
era from the way we can experience them. We must study
those forms of expression that belong to the feeling, the
mood, the mental habit of a human soul in the time of the
Gita, who might live through what that great poem contains.
We must study it not in an external philological sense, not
in order to give academic commentaries, but to show how
different is the whole configuration of feeling and idea in
that poem from what we have now. Although the conceptual
explanation of the world — which today, to use a graphic
term, lies below and then lay above — though the content
of thought is the same, the form of expression is different.
Whoever would stop with the abstract contents of these
thoughts may find them easy to understand, but whoever
would work his way through to the real, living experience
will not find it easy. It will cost him some pains to go this
way again and feel with the ancient man of India because
it was by this way that such concepts first arose as those
that flowed out into the words sattwa, rajas, tamas. I do not
attach importance to the ideal concepts these words imply
in the Bhagavad Gita, but indeed we today are inclined to
take them much too easily, thinking we understand them.

What is it that actually lies in these words? Without a
living sympathy with what was felt in them we cannot fol-
low a single line of the poem with the right quality of feel-
ing, particularly in its later sections. At a higher stage,
our inability to feel our way into these concepts is some-

116

thing like trying to read a book in a language that is not
understood. For such a person there would be no ques-
tion of seeking out the meaning of concepts in commen-
taries. He would just set to work to learn the language. So
here it is not a matter of interpreting and commenting on
the words sattwa, rajas, tamas in an academic way. In
them lies the feeling of the whole period of the Gita, some-
thing of immense significance because it led men to an
understanding of the world and its phenomena. If we
would describe the way they were led, we must first free
ourselves from many things that are not to be found in such
men as Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte, yet lie in the wide-
spread, fossilized thinking of the West. By sattwa, rajas,
tamas is meant a certain kind of living one’s way into
the different conditions of universal life, in its most varied
kingdoms. It would be abstract and wrong to interpret
these words simply on the basis of the ancient Indian qual-
ity of thought and feeling. It is easier to take them in the
true sense of the life of that time but to interpret them as
much as possible through our own life. It is better to
choose the external contour and coloring of these concep-
tions freely out of our own experience.

Let us consider the way man experiences nature when
he enters intelligently into the three kingdoms that sur-
round him. His mode and quality of knowledge is different
in the case of each. I am not trying to make you under-
stand sattwa, rajas and tamas exhaustively. I only want
to help you to come a little nearer to an idea of their mean-
ing. When man today approaches the mineral kingdom he
feels he can penetrate it and its laws with his thinking, can
in a certain sense live together with it. This kind of under-
standing at the time of the Gita would have been called a
sattwa understanding of the mineral kingdom. In the plant

kingdom we always encounter an obstacle, namely, that
with our present intelligence we cannot penetrate life. The
ideal now is to investigate and analyze nature from a phys-
ical-chemical standpoint, and to comprehend it in this
manner. In fact, some scientists spin their threads of
thought so far as to imagine they have come nearer to the
idea of life by producing external forms that imitate as
closely as possible the appearance of the generative process.
This is idle fantasy. In his pursuit of knowledge man does
not penetrate the plant kingdom as far as he does the min-
eral. All he can do is to observe plant life. Now what one
can only observe, not enter with intellectual understanding,
is ra ./as-understanding. When we come to the animal
kingdom, its form of consciousness escapes our everyday
intelligence far more than does the life of a plant. We do
not perceive what the animal actually lives and experiences.
What man with his science today can understand about
the animal kingdom is a /amas-understanding.

We may add something further. We shall never reach
an understanding beyond the limits of abstract concepts
if we consider only the concepts of science regarding the
activity of living beings. Sleep, for example, is not the same
for man and animal. Simply to define sleep would be like
defining a knife as the same thing whether used for shaving
or cutting meat. If we would keep an open mind and ap-
proach the concepts of tamas, rajas and sattwa once more
from a different aspect we can add something else taken
from our present-day life.

Man today nourishes himself with various substances,
animal, plant and mineral. These foods of course have dif-
ferent effects on his constitution. When he eats plants he
permeates himself with sattwa conditions. When he tries
to understand them they are for him a rajas condition.

118

Nourishment from the assimilation of mineral substance —
salts and the like — represents a condition of rajas; that
brought about by eating meat represents tamas. Notice
that we cannot keep the same order of sequence as if we
were starting from an abstract definition. We have to keep
our concepts mobile. I have not told you this to inspire
horror in those who feel bound to eating meat. In a mo-
ment I shall mention another matter where the connection
is again different.

Let us imagine that a man is trying to assimilate the
outer world, not through ordinary science but by that kind
of clairvoyance that is legitimate for our age. Suppose
that he now brings the facts and phenomena of the sur-
rounding world into his clairvoyant consciousness. All
this will call forth a certain condition in him, just as for
ordinary understanding the three kingdoms of nature call
forth conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. In effect what
can enter the purest form of clairvoyant perception corre-
sponding to purified clairvoyance, calls forth the condition
of tamas. (I use the word “purified” not in the moral
sense.) A man who would truly see spiritual facts objec-
tively, with that clairvoyance that we can attain today,
must by this activity bring about in himself the condition
of tamas. Then when he returns into the ordinary world
where he immediately forgets his clairvoyant knowledge,
he feels that with his ordinary mode of knowledge he en-
ters a new condition, a new relation to knowledge, namely,
the sattwa condition. Thus, in our present age everyday
knowledge is the sattwa condition. In the intermediate
stage of belief, of faith that builds on authority, we are in
the rajas condition.

Knowledge in the higher worlds brings about the condi-
tion of tamas in the souls of men. Knowledge in our every-

day environment is the condition of sattwa; while faith,
religious belief resting on authority, brings about the con-
dition of rajas. So you see, those whose constitution com-
pels them to eat meat need not be horrified because meat
puts them in a condition of tamas because the same con-
dition is brought about by purified clairvoyance. It is that
condition of an external thing when by some natural proc-
ess it is most detached from the spiritual. If we call the
spirit “light” then the tamas condition is devoid of light.
It is “darkness.” So long as our organism is permeated by
the spirit in the normal way we are in the sattwa condition,
that of our ordinary perception of the external world. When
we are asleep we are in tamas. We have to bring about
this condition in sleep in order that our spirit may leave
our body and enter the higher spirituality around us. If
we would reach the higher worlds — and the Evangelist al-
ready tells us what man’s darkness is — our human nature
must be in the condition of tamas. Since man is in the
condition of sattwa, not of tamas, which is darkness, the
words of the Evangelist, “The light shineth in darkness
and the darkness comprehendeth it not,” can be rendered
somewhat as follows, “The higher light penetrated as far
as man, but he was filled by a natural sattwa that he would
not give up.” Thus the higher light could not find entrance
because it can only shine in darkness.

If we are seeking knowledge of such living concepts as
sattwa, rajas and tamas, we must get accustomed to not
taking them in an absolute sense. They are always, so to
say, turning this way and that. For a right concept of the
world there is no absolute higher or lower, only in a rela-
tive sense. A European professor took objection to this.
He translated sattwa as “goodness” and objected to an-
other man who translated it as “light,” though he trans-

120

lated tamas as “darkness.” Such things truly express the
source of all misunderstanding. When man is in the con-
dition of tamas — whether by sleep or clairvoyant percep-
tion, to take only these two cases — then in effect he is in
darkness as far as external man is concerned. So ancient
Indian thought was right, yet it could not use a word like
“light” in place of the word sattwa. Tamas may always be
translated “darkness” but for the external world the sattwa
condition could not always be simply interpreted as “light.”

Suppose we are describing light. It is entirely correct to
call the light colors — red, orange, yellow — in the sense of
Sankhya philosophy the sattwa colors. In this sense too
green must be called a rajas color; blue, indigo, violet,
tamas colors. One may say effects of light and of clair-
voyance in general fall under the concept of sattwa. Under
the same concept we must also place, for example, good-
ness, kindness, loving behavior by man. It is true that
light falls under the concept of sattwa, but this concept is
broader; light is not really identical with it. Therefore it
is wrong to translate sattwa as “light” though it is quite
possible to translate tamas as “darkness.” Nor is it correct
to say that “light” does not convey the idea of sattwa.

The criticism that the professor made of a man who may
have been well aware of this is also not quite justified, for
the simple reason that if someone said, “Here is a lion,”
nobody would attempt to correct him by saying, “No, here
is a beast of prey.” Both are correct. This comparison hits
the nail right on the head. As regards external appearance
it is correct to associate sattwa with what is full of light,
but it is wrong to say sattwa is only of light. It is a more
general concept than light, just as beast of prey is more
general than lion.

A similar thing is not true of darkness for the reason that

1 2 I

in tamas things that in rajas and sattwa are different and
specific merge into something more general. After all, a
lamb and a lion are two very different creatures. If I would
describe them as to their sattwa characters — the form that
the natural element of life and force and spirit takes in
lambs and lions — I would describe them very differently.
But if I would describe them in the condition of tamas the
differences do not come into consideration because we have
the tamas condition when the lamb or lion is simply lying
lazily on the ground. In the sattwa condition lambs and
lions are very different, but for cosmic understanding the
indolence of both is after all one and the same.

Our power of truly looking into such concepts must
therefore adapt to much differentiation. As a matter of
fact, these three concepts with the qualities of feeling in
them are among the most illuminating things in the whole
of Sankhya. In all that Krishna puts before Arjuna, when
he presents himself as the founder of the age of self-con-
sciousness, he has to speak in words altogether permeated
by those shades of feeling derived from the concepts sat-
twa, rajas, tamas. About these three concepts, and what
at length leads to a climax in the Bhagavad Gita, we shall
speak more fully in the last lecture of this course.

122

IX

The LATTER part of the Bhagavad Gita is permeated
by feelings and shades of meaning saturated with ideas of
sattwa, rajas and tamas. In these last chapters our whole
mode of thinking and feeling must be attuned so as to un-
derstand what is said in the sense of those three condi-
tions. In the last lecture I sought to give an idea of those
important concepts by making use of present-day experi-
ences. Certainly anyone who enters deeply into this poem
must perceive that since the time when it arose those con-
cepts have shifted to some extent. Nevertheless, it would
not have been correct to describe them simply by verbal
quotations from the poem because our mode of feeling is
different from what is contained there and we are unable
to make those very different feelings our own. If we tried
to we would only be describing the unknown by the un-
known.

So in the Bhagavad Gita you will find with regard to
food that the concepts we developed last time have shifted
a little. What is true for man today about plant food was
true for the ancient Indian of that food Krishna calls mild,
gentle food. Whereas rajas food, which we described cor-
rectly for man today as mineral food (salt, for instance),
would have been designated at that time as sour or sharp.

123

For our constitution meat is essentially a tamas food, but
the Indian meant by this something that could hardly be
considered food at present, which gives us an idea of how
different men were then. They called tamas food what had
become rotten, had stood too long and had a foul smell.
For our present incarnation we could not properly call that
tamas food because man’s organism has changed, even as
far as his physical body.

Thus, in order to understand these feelings of sattwa,
rajas and tamas, so fundamental in the Gita, it is well for
us to apply them to our own conditions. Now if we would
consider what sattwa really is, it is best to begin by taking
the most striking conception of it. In our time the man who
can give himself up to knowledge as penetrating as our
present knowledge of the mineral kingdom is a sattwa
man. For the Indian he was not one who had such knowl-
edge, but was one who went through the world with intel-
ligent understanding as we would say, with heart and head
in the right place. A man who takes without prejudice and
bias the phenomena the world offers. A man who always
perceives the world with sympathy and conceives it with
intelligence; who receives the light of ideas, of feelings and
sentiments streaming out from all the beauty and loveli-
ness of the world; who avoids all that is ugly, developing
himself rightly. He who does all this in the physical world
is a sattwa man. In the inorganic world a sattwa impres-
sion is that of a surface not too brilliant, illuminated in
such a way that its details of color can be seen in their right
lustre yet bright also.

A rajas impression is one where a man is in a certain way
prevented by his own emotions, his impulses and reactions,
or by the thing itself, from fully penetrating what lies
around him, so that he does not give himself up to it but

124

meets it with what he himself is. For example, he becomes
acquainted with the plant kingdom. He can admire it, but
he brings his own emotions to bear on it and therefore can-
not penetrate it to its depths.

Tamas is where a man is altogether given up to his bod-
ily life, so that he is blunt and apathetic toward his envi-
ronment, as we are toward a consciousness different from
our own. While we dwell on the physical plane we know
nothing of the consciousness of a dog or a horse, not even
of another human being. In this respect man, as a rule, is
blunt and dull. He withdraws into his own bodily life.
He lives in impressions of tamas. But man must gradually
become apathetic to the physical world in order to have
access to the spiritual worlds in clairvoyance. In this way
we can best read the ideas of sattwa, rajas and tamas. In
external nature a rajas impression would be that of a mod-
erately bright surface, say of green, a uniform green shade;
a dark-colored surface would represent a tamas impression.
Where man looks out into the darkness of universal space,
when the beautiful spectacle of the free heavens appears
to him, the impression he gains is none other than that
blue color that is almost a tamas color.

If we saturate ourselves with the feeling these ideas give
we can apply them to everything that surrounds us. These
ideas are really comprehensive. For the ancient Indian, to
know well about this threefold nature of his surroundings
meant not only a certain understanding of the outer world,
it also meant bringing to life his own inner being. He felt
it somewhat as follows. Imagine a primitive country man
who sees the glory of nature around him — the early morn-
ing sky, the sun and stars, everything he can see. He does
not think about it however. He does not build up concepts
and ideas about the world but just lives on in utmost har-

125

mony with it. If he begins to feel himself an individual
person, distinguishing his soul from his environment, he
has to do so by learning to understand his surroundings
through ideas about them.

To set up one’s environment objectively before one is
always a certain way of grasping the reality of one’s own
being. The Indian of the time of the Bhagavad Gita said,
“So long as one does not penetrate and perceive the sattwa,
rajas and tamas conditions in one’s environment, one con-
tinues merely to live in it. A person is not yet there, inde-
pendently in his own being, but is bound up with his sur-
roundings. However, when the world about him becomes
so objective that one can pursue it everywhere with the
awareness that this is a sattwa condition, this a rajas, that
a tamas, then one becomes more and more free of the world,
more independent in himself. This therefore is one way
of bringing about consciousness of self. At bottom this is
Krishna’s concern — to free Arjuna’s soul from all those
things that surround him and are characteristic of the time
in which he lives. So Krishna explains, “Behold all the
life there on the bloody field of battle where brothers con-
front brothers, with all that thou feelest thyself bound to,
dissolved in, a part of. Learn to know that all that is there
outside you runs its course in conditions of sattwa, rajas
and tamas. Then wilt thou contrast thyself with it; know
that in thine own highest self thou dost not belong to it,
and wilt experience thy separate being within thyself, the
spirit in thee.”

Here we have another of the beautiful elements in the
dramatic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. At first we
are gradually made acquainted with its ideas as abstract
concepts, but afterward these become more and more vivid.
The concepts of sattwa, rajas and tamas take on living

126

shape and form in the most varied spheres of life. Then
at length the separation of Arjuna’s soul from it all is ac-
complished, so to say, before our spiritual gaze. Krishna
explains to him how we must free ourselves from all that
is bound up with these three conditions, from that in which
men are ordinarily interwoven.

There are sattwa men who are so bound up with exist-
ence as to be attached to all the happiness and joy they can
draw from their environment. They speed through the
world, drinking in their blissfulness from all that can give
it to them. Rajas men are diligent, men of action; but they
act because actions have such and such consequences to
which they are attached. They depend on the joy of action,
on the impression action makes upon them. Tamas men
are attached to laziness, they want to be comfortable. They
really do not want to act at all. Thus are men to be dis-
tinguished. Those whose souls and spirits are bound into
external conditions belong to one or other of these three
groups.

“But thine eyes shall see the daybreak of the age of self-
consciousness. Thou shalt learn to hold thy soul apart.
Thou shalt be neither sattwa, rajas nor tamas man.” Thus
is Krishna the great educator of the human ego. He shows
its separation from its environment. He explains soul ac-
tivities according to how they partake of sattwa, rajas or
tamas. If a man raises his belief to the divine creators of
the world he is a sattwa man. Just in that time of the Gita,
however, there were men who in a certain sense knew noth-
ing of the Divine Beings guiding the universe. They were
completely attached to the so-called nature spirits, those
behind the immediate beings of nature. Such men are rajas
men. The tamas men are those who in viewing the world
get only so far as what we may call the ghost-like, which

127

in its spiritual nature is nearest to the material. So, in re-
gard to religious feeling also these three groups may be
distinguished.

If we wished to apply these concepts to religious feeling
in our time we should say (but without flattery) that those
who strive after anthroposophy are sattwa men; those at-
tached to external faith are rajas men; those who, in a
material or spiritual sense, will only believe in what has
bodily shape and form — the materialists and spiritualists
— are the tamas men. The spiritualist does not ask for
spiritual beings in whom he may believe; he is quite pre-
pared to believe in them, but he does not want to lift him-
self up to them. He wants them to come down to him.
They must rap, because he can hear rapping with physical
ears. They must appear in clouds of light because such
are visible to his eyes. Such are tamas men in a certain
conscious sense, and quite in the sense too of the tamas
men of Krishna’s time.

There are also unconscious tamas men; the materialistic
thinkers of our time who deny all that is spiritual. When
materialists meet in conference today they persuade them-
selves that they adhere to materialism on logical grounds,
but this is an illusion. Materialists are people who remain
so not on the basis of logic but for fear of the spiritual.
They deny the spirit because they are afraid of it. They
are in effect compelled to deny it by the logic of their own
unconscious soul, which does indeed penetrate to the door
of the spiritual but cannot pass through. One who can see
reality can see in a materialistic congress how each person
in the depths of his soul is afraid of the spirit. Materialism
is not logic, it is cowardice before the spiritual. All its ar-
guments are nothing but an opiate to damp down this fear.
Actually, Ahriman — the giver of fear — has every material-

128

ist by the neck. This is a grotesque but an austere and
fundamental truth that one may recognize if one goes into
any materialistic meeting. Why is such a meeting called?
The illusion is that people there discuss views of the uni-
verse, but in reality it is a meeting to conjure up the devil
Ahriman, to beckon him into their chambers.

Krishna, then, indicates to Arjuna how the different re-
ligious beliefs may be classified, and he also speaks to him
of the different ways men may approach the Gods in actual
prayer. In all cases the temper of man’s soul can be de-
scribed in terms of these three conditions. Sattwa, rajas
and tamas men are different in the way they relate to their
Gods. Tamas men are such as priests, but whose priest-
hood depends on a kind of habit. They have their office
but no living connection with the spiritual world. So they
repeat Aum, Aum, Aum, which proceeds from the dullness,
the tamas condition of their spirit. They pour forth their
subjective nature in the Aum.

Rajas men look out on the surrounding world and begin
to feel that it has something in it akin to themselves, that
it is related to them and therefore worthy to be worshipped.
They are the men of “Tat” who worship the “That,” the
Cosmos, as being akin to themselves. Sattwa men perceive
that what lives within us is one with all that surrounds us
in the universe outside. In their prayer they have a sense
for “Sat,” the All-being, the unity without and within, unity
of the objective and the subjective. Krishna says that he
who would truly become free in his soul, who does not wish
to be merely a sattwa, rajas or tamas man in any one re-
spect or another, must attain to a transformation of these
conditions in himself so that he wears them like a garment,
while in his real self he grows out beyond them.

This is the impulse that Krishna as the creator of self-

129

consciousness must give. Thus he stands before Arjuna
and teaches him to “Look upon all the conditions of the
world, with all that is to man highest and deepest, but free
thyself from the highest and deepest of the three condi-
tions and in thine own self become as one who lays hold
of himself. Learn and know that thou canst live without
feeling thyself bound up with rajas, or tamas, or sattwa.”
One had to learn this at that time because it was the be-
ginning of the dawn in self-liberation, but here again, what
then required the greatest effort can today be found right
at hand. This is the tragedy of present life. There are too
many today who stand in the world and burrow down into
their own soul, finding no connection with the outer world;
who in their feelings and all their inner experiences are
lonely souls. They neither feel themselves bound up with
the conditions of sattwa, rajas or tamas, nor are they free
from them, but are cast out into the world like an endlessly,
aimlessly revolving wheel. Such men who live only in
themselves and cannot understand the world, who are un-
happy because in their soul-life they are separated from all
external existence — these represent the shadow side of the
fruit that it was Krishna’s task to develop in Arjuna and in
all his contemporaries and successors. What had to be
Arjuna’s highest endeavor has become the greatest suffer-
ing for many men today.

Thus do successive ages change. Today we must say
that we are at the end of the age that began with the time
of the Bhagavad Gita. This may penetrate our feelings
with deep significance. It may also tell us that just as in
that ancient time those seeking self-consciousness had to
hear what Krishna told Arjuna, those seeking their soul’s
salvation today, in whom self-consciousness is developed
to a morbid degree, these too should listen. They should

130

listen to what can lead them once more to an understanding
of the three external conditions. What can do this?

Let us put forward some more preliminary ideas before
we set out to answer this question. Let us ask again, what
is it that Krishna really wants for Arjuna, whose relation
to external conditions was a right one for his time? What
is it that he says with divine simplicity and naivete? He
reveals what he wishes to be even to our present time. We
have described how a kind of picture-consciousness, a liv-
ing imagery, lighted up man’s soul; how there was hovering
above it, so to say, what today is self-consciousness, which
men at that time had to strive for with all their might but
which today is right at hand. Try to live into the soul con-
dition of that time before Krishna introduced the new age.
The world around men did not call forth clear concepts and
ideas, but pictures like those of our dreams today. Thus
the lowest region of soul-life was a picture-like conscious-
ness, and this was illumined from the higher region — of
sleep consciousness — through inspiration. In this way
they could rise to still higher conditions. This ascent was
called “entering into Brahma.” To ask a soul today, living
in Western lands, to enter into Brahma would be a sense-
less anachronism. It would be like requiring a man who is
halfway up a mountain to reach the top by the same way
as one still down in the valley. With equal right could one
ask a Western soul today to do Eastern exercises and “en-
ter into Brahma” because this presupposes that a man is
at the stage of picture consciousness, which as a matter
of fact certain Easterners still are. What the men of the
Gita age found in rising into Brahma, the Western man al-
ready has in his concepts and ideas. This is really true,
that Shankaracharya would today introduce the ideas of
Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte to his revering disciples as the

first stage of rising into Brahma. It is not the content, how-
ever, it is the pains of the way, that are important.

Krishna indicates a main characteristic of this rising
into Brahma, by which we have a beautiful characteriza-
tion of Krishna himself. At that time the constitution of
the soul was all passive. The world of pictures came to you,
you gave yourself up to these flowing pictures. Compare
this with the altogether different nature of our everyday
world. Devotion, giving ourselves up to things, does not
help us to understand them, even though there are many
who do not wish to advance to what must necessarily take
place in our time. Nevertheless, for our age we have to
exert ourselves, to be alive and active, in order to get ideas
and concepts of our surrounding world. Herein lies all the
trouble in our education. We have to educate children so
that their minds are awake when their concepts of the sur-
rounding world are being formed. Today the soul must be
more active than it was in the age before the origin of the
Bhagavad Gita. We can put it so :

Bhagavad Gita Age — rising to Brahma with passive
souls.

Intellectual Age (our present age) — actively working
our way up into the higher worlds.

What then must Krishna say when he wishes to intro-
duce that new age in which the active way of gaining an
understanding of the universe is gradually to begin? He
must say, “I have to come; I have to give thee the ego-
man, a gift that shall impel thee to activity.” If it had all
remained passive as before — a being interwoven with the
world, devoted to the world — the new age would never
have begun. Everything connected with the entry of the
soul into the spiritual world before the time of the Gita ,

132

Krishna calls devotion. “All is devotion to Brahma.” This
he compares to the feminine in man; while what is the self
in man, the active working element that is to create self-
consciousness, that pushes up from within as the gener-
ator of the self-consciousness that is to come, Krishna calls
the masculine in man. What man can attain in Brahma
must be fertilized by Krishna. So his teaching to Arjuna
is, “All men until now were Brahma-men. Brahma is all
that is spread out as the mother-womb of the whole world.
But I am the father, who came into the world to fertilize
the maternal womb.”

Thus the consciousness of self is created, which is to
work on all men. This is indicated as clearly as possible.
Krishna and Brahma are related to each other as father
and mother in the world. Together they produce the self-
consciousness man must have in the further course of his
evolution — the self-consciousness that makes it possible
for him to become ever more perfect as an individual
being. The Krishna faith has altogether to do with the
single man, the individual person. To follow his teaching
exclusively means to strive for the perfection of oneself as
an individual. This can be achieved only by liberating the
self; loosening it from all that adheres to external condi-
tions. Fix your attention on this backbone of Krishna’s
teaching, how it directs man to put aside all externals, to
become free from the life that takes its course in continually
changing conditions of every kind; to comprehend oneself
in the self alone, that it may be borne ever onward to higher
perfection. See how this perfection depends on man’s leav-
ing behind him all the external configuration of things, cast-
ing off the whole of outer life like a shell, becoming free and
ever more inwardly alive in himself. Man tearing himself

1 33

away from his environment, no longer asking what goes on
in external processes of perfection but asking how shall he
perfect himself. This is the teaching of Krishna.

Krishna — that is, the spirit who worked through Krishna
— appeared again in the Jesus child of the Nathan line of
the House of David, described in St. Luke’s Gospel. Thus,
fundamentally, this child embodied the impulse, all the
forces that tend to make man independent and loosen him
from external reality. What was the intention of this soul
that did not enter human evolution but worked in Krishna
and again in this Jesus child? At a far distant time this
soul had had to go through the experience of remaining out-
side human evolution because the antagonist Lucifer had
come; he who said, “Your eyes will be opened and you
will distinguish good and evil, and be as God.” In the an-
cient Indian sense Lucifer said to man, “You will be as the
Gods, and will have power to find the sattwa, rajas and
tamas conditions in the world.”

Lucifer directed man’s attention to the outer world. By
his instigation man had to learn to know the external, and
therefore had to go through the long course of evolution
down to the time of Christ. Then he came who was once
withdrawn from Lucifer; came in Krishna and later in the
Luke Jesus child. In two stages he gave that teaching that
from another side was to be the antithesis of the teaching
of Lucifer in Paradise. “He wanted to open your eyes to
the conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. Shut your eyes
to these conditions and you will find yourselves as men, as
self-conscious human beings.” Thus does the Imagination
appear before us. On the one side the Imagination of Para-
dise, where Lucifer opens man’s eyes to the three condi-
tions in the external world, when for a while the Opponent
of Lucifer withdraws. Then men go through their evolu-
tion and reach the point where in two stages another teach-

i34

ing is given them, of self-consciousness, which bids them
close their eyes to the three external conditions. Both
teachings are one-sided. If the Krishna-Jesus influence
alone had continued, one one-sidedness would have been
added to another. Man would have taken leave of all that
surrounds him, would have lost all interest in external evo-
lution. Each person would only have sought his own per-
fection. Striving for perfection is right; but such striving
bought at the price of a lack of interest in the whole of
humanity is one-sided, even as the Luciferic influence was
one-sided. Hence the all-embracing Christ Impulse en-
tered, the higher synthesis of the two one-sided tendencies.

In the personality of the St. Luke Jesus child Himself
the Christ Impulse lived for three years; the Christ who
came to mankind to bring together these two extremes.
Through each of them mankind would have fallen into
weakness and sin. Through Lucifer humanity would have
been condemned to live one-sidedly in the external condi-
tions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. Through Krishna they
were to be educated for the other extreme, to close their
eyes and seek only their own perfection. Christ took the
sin upon Himself. He gave to men what reconciles the two
one-sided tendencies. He took upon Himself the sin of
self-consciousness that would close its eyes to the world
outside. He took upon Himself the sin of Krishna, and of
all who would commit his sin, and He took upon Himself
the sin of Lucifer and of all who would commit the sin of
fixing their attention on externalities. By taking both ex-
tremes upon Himself he makes it possible for humanity
by degrees to find a harmony between the inner and the
outer world because in that harmony alone man’s salvation
is to be found.

An evolution that has once begun, however, cannot end

suddenly. The urge to self-consciousness that began with
Krishna went on and on, increasing and intensifying self-
consciousness more and more, bringing about estrange-
ment from the outer world. In our time too this course is
tending to continue. At the time when the Krishna impulse
was received by the Luke Jesus child mankind was in the
midst of this development, this increase of self-conscious-
ness and estrangement from the outer world. It was this
that was brought home to the men who received the bap-
tism of John in the Jordan, so that they understood the
Baptist when he said to them, “Change your disposition;
walk no longer in the path of Krishna” — though he did
not use this word. The path on which mankind had then
entered we may call the Jesus-path if we would speak in an
occult sense. In effect, the pursuit of this Jesus-path alone
went on and on through the following centuries. In many
respects human civilization in the centuries following the
foundation of Christianity was only related to Jesus, not
to the Christ Who lived in Jesus for the three years from
the baptism by John until the Mystery of Golgotha.

Every line of evolution, however, works its way onward
up to a certain tension. In the course of time this longing
for individual perfection was driven to such a pitch that
men were in a certain sense brought more and more into
the tragedy of estrangement from the divine in nature,
from the outer world. Today we are experiencing this in
many ways. Many people are going about among us who
have little understanding left of our environment. There-
fore, it is just in our time that an understanding of the
Christ Impulse must break in upon us. The Christ-path
must be added to the Jesus-path. The path of one-sided
striving for perfection has become too strong. It has gone
so far that in many respects men are so remote from their

136

surroundings that certain movements, when they arise,
over-reach themselves immediately, and the longing for
the opposite is awakened. Many human souls now feel
how little they can escape from this enhanced self-con-
sciousness, and this creates an impulse to know the divin-
ity of the outer world. It is such souls as these who in our
time will seek the understanding of the Christ Impulse
that is opened up by true anthroposophy; the force that
does not merely strive for the one-sided perfection of the
individual soul but belongs to the whole progress of hu-
manity. To understand the Christ means not merely to
strive toward perfection, but to receive in oneself some-
thing expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.”
“I” is the Krishna word. “Not I, but Christ in me,” is the
Christian word.

So we see how every spiritual movement in history has
in a certain sphere its justification. No one must imagine
that the Krishna impulse could have been dispensed with.
No one should ever think either that one human spiritual
movement is fully justified in its one-sidedness. The two
extremes — the Luciferic and the Krishna impulses — had
to find their higher unity in the mission of the Christ.

He who would understand in the true anthroposophic
sense the impulse necessary for the further evolution of
mankind, must realize how anthroposophy has to become
a means of shedding light on all religions. He must learn to
see how the different streams in evolution all flow into the
one main current of development. It would be a dilettante
way of beginning to do this if one tried to find again in the
Krishna stream what can be found in the stream of Chris-
tianity. Only when we regard the matter in this way do
we understand what it means to seek a unity in all reli-
gions. There is, however, another way of doing so. One

137

may repeat over and over, “In all religions the same funda-
mental essence is contained.” In effect, the same essence
is contained in the root of a plant, in the stem, leaves, flow-
ers, the pollen and the fruit. That is true, but it is an ab-
stract truth. It is no more profound than if one were to
say, “Why make any distinctions? Salt, pepper, vinegar
and milk all have their place on the table; all are one, for
all are substance.” Here you can tell how futile such a way
of thought can be, but you do not notice it so easily when
it comes to comparing religions. It will not do to compare
the Chinese, Brahmin, Krishnan, Buddhist, Persian, Mos-
lem, and Christian faiths in this abstract way, saying,
“Look, everywhere we find the same principles. In each
case there is a Savior.”

Abstractions can indeed be found in countless places
and in countless ways, but this is a dilettante method be-
cause it leads to nothing. One may form societies to pur-
sue the study of all religions, and do so in the same sense
as saying pepper, salt, etc. are one because they are all
substance. That has no importance. What is important
is to regard things as they really are. To the way of looking
at things that goes so far in occult dilettantism as to keep
on declaiming the equality of all religions, it is one and
the same whether what lived in the Christ is the pivot of
the whole of evolution or whether it can be found in the
first man you meet in the street. For one who wishes to
guide his life by truth it is an atrocity to associate the im-
pulse in the world’s history that is bound up with the Mys-
tery of Golgotha and for which the name Christ has been
preserved — to associate that impulse with any other im-
pulse in history, because in truth it is the central point of
the whole of earthly evolution.

In these lectures I have tried by means of a particular

138

instance to indicate how present-day occultism must try to
throw light on the different spiritual movements that have
appeared in the course of human history. Though each has
its right and proper point of contact, one must distinguish
between them as between the stem of a plant and the green
leaf, and the green leaf from the colored petal, though all
together form a unity. If one tries with this truly modern
occultism to penetrate with one’s soul into what has flowed
into humanity in diverse currents, one recognizes how the
different religious faiths lose nothing of their greatness and
majesty. How sublime was the greatness that appeared to
us in the figure of Krishna even when we simply tried to
get a definite view of his place in evolution. All such lines
of thought as we can give only in outline are indeed imper-
fect enough, and you may be assured that no one is more
aware of their imperfection than the present speaker. But
the endeavor has been to show in what spirit a true consid-
eration of the spiritual movement toward individuality in
mankind must be carried out. I purposely tried to derive
our thoughts from a spiritual creation remote from us, the
Bhagavad Gita, to show how Western minds can perceive
and feel what they owe to Krishna; what he, through the
continued working of his impulse, still signifies for their
own upward striving.

However, the spiritual movement we here represent nec-
essarily demands that we enter concretely, and with real
love, into the special nature of every current in man’s spir-
itual history. This is a bit inconvenient because it brings
us all too near to the humble thought of how little after all
we really penetrate into their depths. Another idea follows
upon this, that we must go on striving further and ever
further. Both of these ideas are inconvenient. It is the sad
fate of that movement we call anthroposophy, that it pro-

139

duces inconvenient results for many souls. It requires that
we actively lay hold of the definite, separate facts of the
world’s development. At the same time it requires each
of us to say earnestly to himself, “I can indeed reach some-
thing higher, and I will. Always it is only a certain stage
and standpoint that I have attained. I must forever go on
striving — on — and on — without end.”

Thus, all along it has been not quite comfortable to be-
long to that spiritual movement that by our efforts is en-
deavoring to take its place in what is called the Theosophi-
cal Movement.* It has not been easy, because we demand
that people shall learn to strive ever more deeply to pene-
trate the sacred mysteries. We could not supply you with
anything so easy as introducing some person’s son or even
daughter, saying, “You need only wait, the Savior of man-
kind will appear physically embodied in this boy or girl.”
We could not do this because we must be true. Yet, one
who perceives what is happening cannot but regard these
latest proceedings as the final grotesque outcome of the
dilettante comparison of religions that can also be put for-
ward so easily, and that continually repeats what should
be taken as a matter of course, the tritest of all sayings,
“All religions contain the same essence.”

The last weeks and months have shown — and my speak-
ing here on this significant subject has shown it again —
that a circle of people can be found at the present time who
are ready to seek spiritual truths. We have no other con-
cern than to put these truths forward, though many, or

* Dr. Steiner is referring here, and in the following passages, to his break
with the Theosophical Society and to the formation of the Anthroposophical
Society. A full account of these events can be found in G. Wachsmuth, The
Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner, pp. 186-189, available from the An-
throposophic Press, Inc.

140

even everyone, may leave us. If so, it will make no differ-
ence in the way the spiritual truths are here proclaimed.
The sacred obligation to truth will guide that movement
that underlies this cycle of lectures. Whoever would go
with us must do so under the conditions that have now be-
come necessary. It is certainly more convenient to proceed
otherwise, not entering into another side of the matter as
we do by pointing out the reality in all things. But that
also is part of our obligation to truth. It is simpler to in-
form people of the equality and unity of religions, or tell
them they are to wait for the incarnation of a Savior who
is predestined, whom they are to recognize not by them-
selves but on someone’s authority.

Human souls today will themselves have to decide how
far a spiritual movement can be carried on and upheld by
pure devotion to the ideal of truthfulness. In our time it
had to come to that sharp cleavage, whose climax was
reached when those who had no other desire than to set
forth what is true and genuine in evolution, were described
as Jesuits. This was a convenient way of separating, but
the external evidence was the work of objective falsehood.
This cycle of lectures may once more have shown you that
we have been working out of no one-sided tendency, since
it comprises the present, the past, and the primal past, in
order to reveal the unique, fundamental impulse of human
evolution. So I too may say that it fills me with the deepest
satisfaction to have been able to give these lectures here
before you. This shows me there is hope because there
are souls here who have the impulse, the urge toward that
which works also in the supersensible with nothing but
simple, honest truthfulness.

I was forced to add this final word to these lectures, for
it is necessary in view of all that has happened to us in the

course of time down to the point of being excluded from
the Theosophical Society. Considering all we have suf-
fered, and all that is now being falsely asserted in numer-
ous pamphlets, it was necessary to say something, although
a discussion of these matters is always painful to me.

Those who desire to work with us must know that we
have taken for our banner the humble, yet unconditional,
honest, striving for truth; striving ever upward into the
higher worlds.

142

^imi,

Lai Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration Library

MUSSOORIE

7£*JL)°&K

fw jtt srcrcr T|$r sira

i

Please return this book on or before the date last stamped
below.

294«5$24

St©

$f:

Class No

^JSJT

^rf^r tf.
ACC. No.
w.

Book No,

/6

?. S< §£

Author.., Steiner. Rudolf

m* *

T;., 'PH*.

2SM-S92M

Stc

LIBRARY

LAL BAHADUR SHA8TRI

National Academy of Administratior

MUSSOORIE

Accession No.

1. Books are Issued for IS days only but
may have to be recalled earlier if urgen-
tly required.

2. An over-due charge of 25 False per day per
volume will be charged.

3. Books may be renewed on request, at the
discretion of the Librarian.

4. Periodloais, Rare and Reference booke may
not be issued and may be consulted only
In the Library.

5. Books lost dafaoed or Injured In eny way
shall have to bO reptaoed or Its doubts
price shall be peid by the borrower.

to

,ctetm&nu>

1